You see, yesterday it was rumoured that T-mobile might be entering the Canadian Telecom market.
Which is great news for those of us who live in places like Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver...
But Canada is a big place, with a population spread out thinly, like too little butter on too much bread. What about those of us who don't live in places where the rest of us live? In rural areas. In places where the local multiplex has less than one movie a week, because there is no multiplex. Or movie theatre.
In places like, oh, say Saskatchewan, that isn't a problem; you stick a cell phone tower on top of a really tall barn, and boom, you have coverage for half the province. (Okay; I jest. You'd need at least four or five towers to cover the whole province...)
However, that doesn't work in someplace like BC. Take a place like, oh, say, Tumbler Ridge, BC, which, by some odd coincidence is where I live. Population? South of 5000 people. It was only two years ago or so that we finally got cell phone service, by way of Telus. While we weren't the last place in the province to get cell phone access, we were pretty far down the list. And if you drive around the corner from town, reception goes from four bars to none in about four feet.
So, even if T-Mobile comes into Canada bearing their shiny new iPhones, chances are the service will be rolled out across the country very slowly. If their roll-out is anything like Rogers, I should expect to see the iPhone in Tumbler Ridge sometime by the turn of the next century...if I'm lucky. Heck, even if Rogers brings the iPhone out, I am still left out in the cold (and believe me, it can get chilly here) until we see a CDMA version.
Come on, CDMA....
(*That number is like, totally made up. 70% of the population live in urban areas, while another 15% live in rural-urban areas, according to the Gov't website. I am way too lazy to look up the total land area that urban areas cover, but Im thinking it's less than 15%).
No comments:
Post a Comment