Marvel at the wonders of 3G! Up in Canada, cellphone provider Rogers will be the first carrier in North America to let its users make video calls. This high bandwidth activity is made possible by the company’s shiny new HSDPA network. Rogers also plans to use all this extra bandwidth (current HSDPA speeds range from 1.8Mbits/s to 14.4Mbits/s) to funnel to its subscribers the weekly top 50 YouTube videos. Now you can watch Carl Rove control the mic while on-the-go!
Meanwhile, those of us in the U.S. are still waiting for some sort of decent 3G network. Meh, cellphones are a fad anyway.
Hey everyone,
does that mean you can browse youtube properly on the handsets or only the top 50 videos? thanks
Nicholas, you’re misleading your readers. Yes, Rogers may be unveiling this service in Canada, but NO ONE will be able to afford it.
You Yankees can get unlimited mobile internet for $20-30/mo but here in Toronto I’m paying Rogers $65 ($56 USD)/mo for a whole 25MB!!! And I’m charged $7 for each MB over. NONE of the Canadian carriers even offer an unlimited plan. The best you can get is 200MB for $100! So I assure you, this announcement is nothing special.
By the time Rogers makes the service affordable, the US carriers will already have it and be pushing it very competitively. And I’ll be sitting here wishing it was a financially feasible option.
Video calls from the mobile… It’s like europe three years ago :)
Also: 26 US$/month for 1GB HSDPA with up to 7.2MBit or 66 US$ for 20gb (which is not expensive because a DSL flatrate costs around that).
I’d like to give america the video calls and get cheap internet acccess instead…
How about video calls over the internet? Does anyone know of such a svc? This would take the service provider out of the picture.