Taking advantage of event based billing

The data plans at every cellular provider in Canada are far too expensive. My lust for surfing on the bus led me to search for ways to work around the system. There are a few common ways of transferring data that are charged on a per item basis regardless of how much data is being sent.
For example, Fido offers an Instant Messaging option with unlimited free incoming messages. You have to pay a $5 for the option plus a $3 portal fee on top of that for either MSN or Yahoo!, but it can get you a quite a bit. Not only do you get unlimited free incoming messages but you get 2,500 outgoing messages. If you would rather use AIM then Fido allows that through SMSes. IMs are free to receive through SMS and sent messages are taken from your SMS bucket.

A few providers also allow you to forward emails to your handset through SMS. Costs on this vary.

Here’s a few suggestions:

• Subscribe to your favourite RSS feeds through R-Mail. This will send you an email containing a link and a synopsis of the feed whenever it’s updated.
• Write to an RSS feed over IM through Sabifoo. This can be syndicated to your own blog.
• Post to your blog via email rather than a web or application interface. Several kilobytes are used up per email just in overhead so if you’re paying too much per kilobyte, try sending an email by SMS.
• Become familiar with bots on your instant messenger network. AOL’s Bots include weather and movie information. MSN doesn’t have a central list of bots but their Encarta bot (encarta@conversagent.com) is useful.

Good luck trimming your phone bill!