Tom Purves – Product Management, Fintech & AI

From the window 37 floors up and street level in the lobby at Bay and King, I can see it. Yes it’s there, it’s open and free. Now, has anyone had any luck connecting to the damn thing?

update: I mean, besides Mr Miller ?

Have you seen what the carriers in Canada charge for EVDO access? A great service that many in the US and elsewhere rave about. get a little card for your laptop and “Life is good—it’s like the whole world is one big Wifi network with this card. If you own a computer that can use an EVDO card, you have to get one.” (Guy Kawasaki). Great! I’m sold… so what are Bell Canada’s rates for EVDO wireless data transfer?

	Monthly Rates	Data Volume	Additional Volume	Voyageur U.S Data Roaming
Light	$25	4 MB	$12/MB	$6/MB
Standard	$40	8 MB	$8/MB	$6/MB
Premium	$60	30 MB	$6/MB	$6/MB
Ultimate	$100	250 MB	$3/MB	$3/MB

Now for the math. EVDO has a maximum advertised speed of 700kbs (downstream). Assuming I remember how computers work, this is 700bits/8bits perByte, 1024kBytes/MB or 0.0854 MB/s. and there are 3600seconds in an hour. So bell “recommends” that you get the 100/month plan with EVDO. What you get for $100/month? Say you want to download a large file (gasp) or (god forbid) watch some streaming video or something. At maximum speed your 250MB monthly allowance would last you exactly less than 49 minutes*. And after that, at 3/MB, Bell will let you surf the Internet for the low low incremental price of only $923/hour (or $15/minute). And you thought printer ink was expensive.

And wait for it, do the math on their “lite plan” and at $12/mb that works out to a theoretical maximum charge of $29,531/hr. wow, great! where do I sign up?

Of course another local carrier Telus also offers EVO. It’s funny because, in what must be a truly remarkable coincidence of free-market capitalism, Telus is also advertising the *exact same* prices and pricing structure as Bell Canada.

not that it matters for switching anyway, our country seems to be the last in the civilized world to offer number portability.

Oh Canadian telecom regulators, what have you done for me recently?

*assuming that maximum speed is attainable, assuming you pay for actual and not just effective bandwidth used including packet overhead and such, but not even counting corresponding upstream bandwidth used which would jack up the cost even further

update: just for fun, lets say you signed up for the lite plan and left a bit torrent (for example) running and they allowed you to saturate your bandwidth for the entire month. What is the maximum bill you could theoretically see on your monthly statement? $3691/hr x (up to) 744 hrs in a month = that would be a 2.746 Million dollar phone bill.

Dammit, too many good shows coming up in september. Haven’t been out to a show in months and now this, plus film festival, plus more work than ever this month. What is a man to do? I want to see all of these! and you should to!

Date

1-Sep-06

1-Sep-06

11-Sep-06

12-Sep-06

13-Sep-06

16-Sep-06

19-Sep-06

22-Sep-06

22-Sep-06

28-Sep-06

28-Sep-06

29-Sep-06

Show	Venue	Price
A SILVER MT. ZION	CLINTONS	SOLD OUT
ELLEN ALLIEN	MOD CLUB	$15.00
M. WARD	MOD CLUB	$16.50
EMILY HAINES (11:00 pm)	GLADSTONE	$20.00
SERENA MANEESH	LEE’S	$10.00
MATES OF STATE	LEE’S	$13.50
MOUNTAIN GOATS	LEE’S	$15.00
CONTROLLER.CONTROLLER	HORSESHOE	$12.50
HOLY FUCK / SHOUT OUT OUT OUT OUT	MOD CLUB	$17.50
THE ISLANDS	OPERA HOUSE	$13.00
MEMPHIS	LEE’S	$12.00
TOKYO POLICE CLUB	SNEAKY DEES	$10.00

(Listings via and tickets purchasable at RotateThis. shows in bold represent the ones you really really can’t miss. sigh.)

In other music news, this is an absolutely incredible season for new tunes. My fall podcast is coming together and the tracks are so good it’s absolutely shivering, it may explode. I’m trying to wait off to give a chance to discover even more new bands but I don’t know how much longer I can hold it. In the meantime gentle reader, I urge you to try best you can to contain yourselves, perhaps slack your bursting anticipation with a relisten of:

Best of Summer06 music podcast
Best of Spring06 music podcast

and (psst) here’s a secret bootleg rss feed of rotatethis new concert announcements I hacked together for you lazy I mean cunning hipsters here: http://feed43.com/3155512644830768.xml

See you at the show.

Hey, d’you know about the party after the show? – Yeah. -Aw man, it’s gonna be the best, I’m so stoked! …Did you hear about the party? Yeah…. I think I’m gonna go but, um, my friends don’t really wanna go…