Update April 8th 2009: There’s a Bell autodialer reporting that Twitter charges will be refunded.

I’ve been experimenting with Twitter‘s resumed SMS service in Canada. Right now it only works with Bell Mobility and, well, I’m a Bell subscriber. Twitter claims the service is free but I quickly heard reports of fifteen cent charges cropping up on the #belltwit hashtag. I decided to do my own experiment while waiting for Twitter’s correction.

Yesterday at about four o’clock I sent a message to 21212. I forgot to input my PIN, so I got back an error message. I sent another message with my PIN this time and it got posted. Next, I got someone to DM me so that I could receive a SMS, and then I got the same person to post a public message after I enabled “device updates” for his account. I received both the DM and the public message, then called *611 to see what the charge was.

Long story short, I was told to call back today. I logged in to my Bell account and saw six new charges. One was “text message from internet” and five were “txt message – short code programs.” So I called *611 again.

Total charge: $0.45. I asked them to look up the Twitter short code as a biller and apparently it’s not there as a subscription service, so you’re not being charged for incoming messages.

Bell has since confirmed that they won’t charge for incoming messages from Twitter. This is consistent with what I found out through billing. I sent two messages, so get charged $0.30, plus I got a message from Google Calendar, adding the other $0.15. I didn’t realize that Google Calendar messages costed so I’ll be cancelling those today.

Update: Original Bell press release says charge was intended to be incoming and outgoing.

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• For Whom The Bell Texts (twitter.com)

photo credit: Seattle Municipal Archives

The CBC has managed to round up most of the telecom issues in one post about the election. Among them are the new fees for incoming SMS messages, throttling of third party DSL ISPs, and the lack of competition on the wireless front.

The last good point that they made is that too few people know about the ccts. That’s the Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunications Services. If you’re at your wit’s end and an executive letterbomb isn’t your style, give it a shot. Filing a complaint is easy.

The CBC article missed one thing, though. There are rumours curculating that Bell plans to take back quick GPS locks on some of their mobile devices. There hasn’t been any official confirmation, one of the Bell employees on dslreports.com says it’s unlikely, but even if it goes through there’s a good primer on what might happen from the comments section at a post by Michael Geist. At worst, AGPS might get the axe unless you pay an additional fee. I’d still be able to get a free and accurate lock on my HTC Touch but it’d take a while. I suppose I can live with that.

I’m on Bell’s $7 unlimited browsing plan. The Terms of Service clearly state that streaming audio is not allowed. It’s one of those clauses that they use to terminate accounts that go over some sliding limit of profitable bandwidth use. Since this month I had only used four megabytes and the average for killed accounts seems to be about two thousand, I decided to push my luck. I decided to forego my iPod in favour of my HTC Touch and Windows Media Player. (The Touch is notable as being the only smartphone able to get a consumer unlimited data plan in Canada.)

My stream of choice was Digitally Imported’s Trance stream. I gave it a go at home on the 96 kilobit WMA stream and was surprised to hear very choppy music with the default buffering. I benchmarked my phone at an average download of 400 kilobit over download, and now it can’t take 96 kilobit? I double checked and Windows Media Player was set for a 384 kilobit cellular connection. When using TCPMP I was able to get 96 kilobit MP3 reliably without any changes to buffer settings but I spent most of the day using WMP.

I set myself up for 40 kilobit music stream. It played on my phone just fine with the basic Windows Media Player that came with the device. Next up: Getting this music through my headphones.

This was trickier. The phone itself has no headphone jack. It does come with a gadget that splits the USB mini jack into USB jack and what they label a headphone jack. It’s not your standard 8mm jack, it’s about the same size as a USB-mini jack but asymmetric and skewed. I assume it’s some jack that’s meant for cellular headsets. There’s also a converter to something sub-8mm that I found useless. Into this splitter I plugged in a pair of earphones with the skewed adapter that came with the Touch.

At 40 kilobit I was able to walk around downtown Toronto towards campus with no skips or bumps. Instead of being pleased with this I was just disappointed that I couldn’t use my own headphones. It’s impossible to give a good judgement of sound quality here.

Even in a noisy environment I’m able to tell the difference between 40 kilobit WMA and 96 kilobit WMA when using the pair of AKG K27i headphones I use for walkabouts. And that’s not even considering the pair of Sennheiser HD555 that I use for home enjoyment of music. On the pair that came with the device I couldn’t tell between 40 kilobit and 96 kilobit in a quiet environment, and I haven’t figured out how to connect my real headphones yet.

So far the only thing I can say is it’s a pain.

Unfortunately I feel a bit of a disconnect here. iOptOut will be useful for my parents, sure, but I don’t own a landline and neither does anyone I know. Everyone has gone cellular, partly because it’s cheaper and partly because there’s no telemarketers.

Facebook is changing Beacon privacy settings just like they did with the news feed.

Oh, and we’ll get a chunk of the spectrum auction set aside for new entrants after all.

With MobileMiser you can set up what they call callback direct. You associate your destination with one of three phone numbers. When you dial this number you get a busy signal like any callback, and then MobileMiser will connect you to your associated destination without any extra dialing. Very cool. This is great for people whose phones don’t have a calling card feature or don’t let you use your contact list in the middle of a call.

Because it’s a callback it is a little more expensive than a dialthrough. I’ll give an example using Toronto prices. Renting a DID (essentially a number for people to dial) generally costs under ten dollars per month plus $0.011 per minute incoming. Outgoing is about $0.02 per minute in Canada/US. Of course volume discounts apply, and I do see some emerging DIDs that have unlimited minutes, but in general the trend I see is outgoing calls cost more than incoming calls to Toronto. A callback that has to make two outgoing calls is going to cost more than a callthrough that has one incoming call and one outgoing call.

So, is the convenience of having this associated number worth paying MobileMiser‘s 4.9c per minute over xpresscall‘s 3.33c per minute? Not to me, but still, very cool feature.

It’s $300 US for the basic kit which is pretty well stocked. It includes the stylus, headset, carrying pouch, a half gig memory card, lanyard and the data cable. The $450 developer kit stuffs all that into a big padded toolbox plus a debug board, extra battery and memory card, extra USB cable as well as a Torx T6 screwdriver and a guitar pick to pop the thing open.

The openmoko site has been updated. It has many more details than before but the best sources of information remain the mailing lists. The announce list is a good one to be on as a bare minimum, the others tend to be high volume. I’m still waiting on a better data plan before I replace my phone but this is a good candidate.

The Star has the story. Telus is wary of the merger not being allowed.

…

Vancouver-based Telus, the country’s second-biggest phone company, confirmed Thursday it has entered into a mutual non-disclosure and standstill agreement and is pursuing non-exclusive discussions with BCE about a possible merger. “Telus believes the combination of the two businesses would represent a compelling strategic and financial opportunity for all BCE and Telus stakeholders,” [Telus] CEO Darren Entwistle said in a release.

…

Federal Industry Minister Maxime Bernier acknowledged last week the government is aware of the fierce debate around whether Canada’s mobile market lacks competition as industry players exchanged barbs over whether the country’s main mobile companies – BCE, Telus and Rogers Communications Inc. (TSX: RCI.B) – have already become too dominant.

…

Recent media reports, quoting sources close to the company, said Telus was unlikely to join the bidding unless there has a clear signal from Ottawa that it would not block a marriage of the country’s two largest telecommunications companies.

This news comes just as the set-aside for the spectrum auction is being discussed. I think that this will generate some more comments angled towards helping new entrants. I’m reminded of the Rogers buyout of Fido, which I couldn’t believe was allowed, and also the mergers in the US.

And now for a word from Stephen Colbert on the mergers.. [Here's an alternate link if the embedded video goes down.]

Update June 27th 2007: All that hype for nothing. Telus did not bid on BCE after all. “The inadequacies of BCE’s bid process did not make it possible for Telus to submit an offer,” said the Vancouver-based firm in a terse, two-line statement.

Click on the thumbnail for a closer look.

I didn’t see anything new there yet and I’m sore there’s no mention of data plans. Any attention given to wireless data prices would’ve been nice, in particular I wish that the group focused a little more on the practices that led to such bad pricing for data plans in Canada.

Wireless Future isn’t the only new site that’s interested in fostering more competition, there’s also Telegopoly.com. They both want to get people to reply to Industry Canada’s call for comments on the wireless spectrum auction. The Coalition behind Wireless Future definitely wants to make it easier for new competitors to enter. Judging from the breakup of the forums on Telegopoly they want measures that make it easier for new entrants too. After reading a few snippets of comments on both sites it seems that a common theme is to set aside of a chunk of the spectrum just for new competitors. It’s too late to comment now but people can reply to comments to Industry Canada which are listed in the forum.

I managed to find a paper that calculates the ACSI (American Consumer Satisfaction Index) of cellular services in Canada [warning, PDF], finding it rates below e-commerice, retail, insurance, newspapers and cable&satelite TV. Unfortunately the sample size was too low. I hope I can find a similar independent paper that has a higher sample size.

I’d be a lot happier if there was some actual competition in the wireless data area. As cool as 3G is, I’d settle for something much slower at a decent price.

Well, I’ll dump all the logs I possibly can, restart and figure out what happened while the next run is underway.

I back up the logs, restart, and it doesn’t work. Now the fun begins! I poured over the configurations. I shelled into both ends and set up sniffers, I saw that call attempts were going out but not getting there. I checked the routing and saw everything was okay. I spend a lot of time reading to make sure that the routing is fine since I’m not very familiar with it. Two hours from the start of the incident I call one of my coworkers.

“Did you try the command display-linkstat:;?”

So I did. The link was down. A quick call to IT showed that the cable was disconnected and it’ll be up in just a minute.

When I did tech support there were a lot of little incidents that I wondered how people didn’t know. Things like changing your IP to a static one for a LANparty, or manually registering a DLL on Windows, or compiling a program from source on Linux. I can do these things without thinking because I immersed myself in this kind of tech for fun. Those people I helped only used it as a tool, just like I only use my test networks as a tool. I think I understand those guys a little better now.