Ordered my 16GB iPhone 3G today from Fido, will receive it in August

Wow, that's an amazing photo of that guy somersaulting -- and, yeah, "don't try this at home" ...unless you work for Cirque du Soleil, I guess! 

Re. the wireless situation: I just got my Fido bill for this month -- I have a cheap-o $7 "unlimited surfing" option (which is a joke, since it's entirely within Fido's extremely limited WAP), which is on top of my $20 (plus taxes etc.) 200 minutes Talk time.  In addition, my bill also accounts for a $9 for a "value pak" that includes caller ID and voice mail.  Yet my total was $60.  Why?  Because Fido tacked on nearly $13 in charges for "downloading" data -- via my G-Mail application, which I had downloaded earlier.  Of course they don't tell you this in advance -- they let you have one MB "free" (as part of that $7 option, which otherwise takes place ENTIRELY in their friggin' walled garden of WAP, which means you go absolutely NOWHERE), and after that one MB they start charging you for every kilobyte, but don't tell you that they're charging until you've hit $15.  

Isn't that swell?

So if I were to keep this up, I could pay $60 every month for ...well, not bloody much at all.  

It's very very frustrating.

And yes, it IS hurting Canadian productivity and our economy incredibly.

But meanwhile, there's very little understanding of how urgent the situation is in economic terms, particularly as it relates to cities and innovation.  Hard and soft infrastructure are both implicated.  For example, you can read this, which is something most of us implicitly understand:

Cities follow transportation. The ability to trade, in goods and ideas, is the primary driver of human development. Paris and London sit on rivers, Chicago on a lakeshore, Seattle alongside a storm-protected harbor. Fundamentally, cities develop to take in raw materials of every kind, then to add value by combining them into more specialized goods. Originally this meant iron ore, coal, and wood shaped into products and buildings. Now it also means software, genetic sequences, and circuitry.

These businesses and ideas don't occur in a vacuum. These ideas are brewed by discussions with the friend you run into at the coffee stand down the street. Every urban area's success is reliant upon its ability to foment face-to-face crossings between inventors and implementers, and these crossings happen proportionally to how dense and walkable our urban centers are.

 And yet in some dinosaur brains, those realities have failed to sink in, and it's business as usual, even to how we (they?) understand the significance of wireless.  That failure reaches right down to urban planning, as per McGill's Prof. of Architecture, Avi Friedman, whose article last Saturday in Victoria's Times-Colonist actually asked, in all sincerity, Has cyberspace killed the traditional town square?  Um, no, Prof. Friedman, if anything, "cyberspace" -- or, more accurately, mobile and locative technologies -- will succeed in bringing the public space back into play after it was nearly demolished by suburban, automobile-centric "city" planning.

Mobile technology makes the agora -- the public space -- real and usable in an immediate way again.  Meet-ups and business deals get planned and hatched and worked out, via mobile technology -- and public space (or semi-public, in cafes, etc.) plays a role here, too.

Heaven forbid that a Canadian academic (outside of Michael Geist and his colleagues) would grok that, though.  For most establishment thinkers, it's all about walled gardens, and about the old(er) economic model that dictates extracting as much pain from users as (in)decently possible. That's the old 19th century model of "resource extraction," which this country's oligarchs built their fortunes on.  It's all about monopolies and playing hardball. 

And unfortunately we have a ways to go before a new model of competition wrests control from their dry and crabby, clenched and greedy fingers.

Resource extraction (hit-and-run, boom-and-bust economies) was all well and good (not!) while it lasted, before cities (even in Canada!) effectively had to say, Get set - the future starts now.   But it's hardly a business model for the 21st century networked economy.

Sorry about the urbanism rant -- but this whole thing with wireless in Canada is driving me nuts...  It really shouldn't be this way.  

Tech Crunch (http://www.techcrunchit.com/2008/07/15/the-new-apple-walled-garden/) made a excelent point yesterday about the iPhone, in short it is more closed and DRM laden and any platform available ou there including Microsoft. After reading this I figured I will wait on the gPhone to see what will happen in the market. Apple has crated a closed system and historically closed systems all fail. I would like to thank  Fido for  treating me (an  existing client since  2003) like garbage and not allowing me to get an iPhone on impulse alone. Now I will wait and see.

Cost of quisition for a new client in the cell industry is 1300$, which means that until they have sucked 1300$ of profit out of you they are not making money, existing long term clients are may more profitalb than new ones so losing existing clients is bad really bad. Who the hell at Fido figured that anoying the crap out of exiting client was a good idea?

I'm happy with the N95 and can't justify the loss of a good camera to get an iPhone 3G. But, the iPhone Pro, that's another story...http://bit.ly/iphonepro

I have ordered my 16GB through Fido and I have been told that I will be receiving a confirmation email. Just wondering have you got that email? I am still waiting for it......................

Well.. I ordered an iPhone and set up my monthly plan on the fido.ca website.  Got the confirmation email, received the order confirmation #, and was told that my Mastercard had been charged, then guess what?  After a week and a half... NO PHONE!  I called them up yesterday to ask what was happening with my order to which the operator's reply was that there was no record of it!  So I'm now mired in a confusing battle with Fido just to find out what happened and exactly what good a confirmation email is if there is no record of it on their end.  Not pleased at all with the service and I'm wondering if I should just go ahead and go to a fido store and try to buy one in person... and hope that my mastercard ISN'T charged for the first one.

p-o'd in Toronto. 

I posted a huge winded and frustrated comment towards fido a couple of hours ago - but I just got off the phone with them again and things are sort of solved. The guy could located my account- after asking for my name, address, home address, SIN number (silly, that little "order number" the website provides you with is apparently useless.) - He was able to see that the number port would have to be completed once I get the phone, and that I should received the phone *gaurenteed* by the 1st of August. I pushed and pushed to get this whole order cancelled but he said that in order to cancel it I need to receive the phone. I argued the fact that even though the phone is not sent out, in order to cancel the order I will need to wait for it to be sent? I expressed how disgusted I was with the service I received by the previous agents - I just hope this wasn't just wishy washy "tell me what I want to hear" business to keep me happy. Oh man, though - if I don't have this bloody thing by the 1st of August hell will be raised. :P

Just ordered another one from Fido for my wife, extremely happy with mine so far!

Just for the record, my wife's been a fido customer for many years and I've been with Telus since 1998. She wanted an iPhone, and we've been talking about figuring out some kind of couples plan, so on July 18th we took the leap and I began the switch to fido, ordering two iPhones.

I'll spare you all the MANY MANY annoying details of this entire process, but she, as a long time fido customer, got hers on July 29th, even though the fido customer service rep placed the order for mine first and assured me it in stock and would go out first. We were both supposed to have the phones in hand by Aug 5th at the absolute latest. I still don't have mine (as of Aug 13th) because of countless screw ups by fido and they say mine might not come till the end of August (?). At this rate that will even be too late to do the 6GB-$30 plan. I am not impressed.

As it stands now, I'm still with Telus (who has always treated me great) and I'm thinking of canceling the entire fido thing. Fido just seems like they don't have their act together at all.

I've ordered my iPhone as well (07/28/2008) however it's still not here yet. I'm not hugely annoyed though because I was told a 2-3 week wait to begin with, and I'm fine with that given how popular the phone is, and how it always takes longer to get things into Canada.

I called a week ago and was told they'd be here by the 29th at the latest, well that hasn't happened so Tuesday (Monday is a Holiday) they're getting a nice phone call.

My bill is going to be about $90/month, that includes:

600 minutes

2500 text messages

Caller Id, Visual Voicemail, Call Waiting, Conference Calling

6GB of Data/month

Unlimited Talk / Text between my girlfriend and myself.

Evenings starting at 7PM

Unlimited Evenings / Weekends.

Not to bad I'd say, it's still expensive, but much better then the default iPhone plans.

Also I find it amusing that you block out the word "suck", it's not even offensive, and you even use it multiple times, just say the word already! /rant.

Finally, if the company sucks so much, why do you pay them money? :D. I always find it amusing when people rant on and on, yet still give a company their money each month.

Probably why I'm so laid back about this stuff.

If you did end up getting your iPhone, I hope you're enjoying it! 

Well ordered a fone few weeks back its not here and im sick of it gonna go make a home made bomb and plant it at their warehouse and headquarters

joking about the bomb lol but seriously this is getting outta hand they are delaying it so much for everyone they just suck i wish i never left telus and came to fido...fido is the worst company in the world and should be shut down lol

apple ftw
fido FAIL