another sam chan: the student blogger

Rogers’ foster child Fido re branded itself yesterday, shedding the passive turquoise and brown to a brighter neon-highlighter-written-on-a-post-it yellow. The logo itself is a doghouse drawn by a sharpie. But I digress. Tons of logos, companies, and even presidents change everyday but I can’t blog about everything. However, this goes further than just logos because it signifies that Rogers has finally decided to place Fido officially in the lightweight provider category.

A bit of boring Canadian provider history points:
– Once upon a time there were four major players in the Canadian provider market (at least to the common eye on the west coast): Fido (owned by Microcell), Rogers Communication, Telus Mobility, & Bell Mobility.
- Rogers buys Fido
- The big four becomes the big 3.5.
- Bell creates Solo Mobile: a subbrand focused on a younger market, with cheap, simple, and easy to calculate plans with minimal contracts.
- Telus creates Koodo: similar to Solo, although Koodo does not publicly affiliate itself with Telus.

With this change, Fido has officially placed itself head to head with Koodo Mobile and Solo Mobile. So what does that have anything to do with us, the consumer? Take a quick look at the site and you’ll see that a lot more was changed than just colors.

That’s right, they’ve gone away with the horrid system access fee! This means that 15 dollar plans may actually be what they say they are and not a mysterious 30 when the skies clear.

In addition, text message plans have been lowered a great deal. All their base plans now offer at least 50 text messages, with the base $25 dollar plan giving you 100 daytime minutes, evenings and weekends starting at 7pm, and unlimited text messaging. Not 1000, not 2500, unlimited. On top of that, you have the option of adding unlimited text messaging to any plan for an affordable $10. How about that?

It may not be giggles for everybody though because here has what they have discreetly taken out while distracting you with the blinding yellow:

-unlimited fido to fido / fido to rogers call and text
- unlimited incoming calls
- my5 (or anything of the sort)
- any sort of couples or family plans

*EDIT: Correction, unlimited incoming and fido to fido can be added on as options for $10 each. Early 5pm calling can also be had for an extra $5 Apologies.

So there it is. There’s a lot of speculation to whether or not this will actually end up hurting Rogers/Fido instead. “Mr. Krstajic, a former executive at both Bell Mobility and Rogers, described the new plans as “reactionary” and said moves like Fido’s risk irritating the firm’s existing customers” as reported by the Globe and Mail. I suppose he meant reactionary in reference to Solo and Kodoo’s success. If you want to keep your current Fido plan, you’re more than welcome to do some – just know that there will continue to be a system access fee until you throw yourself into the new doghouse with a nice three two year contract. I’m a Rogers user and will have to keep paying the SAF anyways but it’s nice to see Fido users have the option.

I have my fair share of Fido friends, and it’ll be interesting to see what they will do. What are you going to do? Is this good news or bad news or it doesn’t matter because you’re a happy Virgin Mobile user?