After years of paying too much, industry pressure may finally deliver decent pricing to road warriors

I want to open this column with a quick tip that will make your BlackBerry experience a little easier: create your own shorthands using the Edit AutoText feature when typing an e-mail. You can set “te” to instantly be replaced with “Thank you for your e-mail” the moment you hit the space bar after typing the final e, for example, or make “100b” magically appear as “The 100 Best Companies to Work for in Canada.” You can define shorthands that are whole paragraphs or even multi-line signatures. This tip can more than double your average typing speed and save you from thumb strain.

But while that tip makes BlackBerry use easier, you’re still stuck with the device’s small keyboard and screen. If that has begun to feel restrictive, it’s time to move up to mobile, notebook-based Internet access. But, forget about Wi-Fi connections in airports, hotels and cafés. We’ve all wandered through retail plazas and neighbourhoods looking for open Wi-Fi links, logged onto networks only to find firewall settings block access to a VPN, or even given up and surfed the ’net on a tiny PDA screen.

Enough. For mobile workers who need constant access, get a cellular PC Card. These add mobile data to a notebook at speeds equal to BlackBerry surfing yet with a full PC experience—a big screen (12 inches and up) and a full keyboard.

But of course there’s a catch: Canadian wireless data plans are not cheap. Bell is the best deal and many mobile pros could get by at the starter price of about $60 per month. (See chart.) 

Consumer industry pressure 
And although prices are still too high, at least they have been moving in the right direction. In April of this year the cost of 500MB of data per month was as much as $1,600 (see http://www.thomaspurves.com/2007/04/09/canada-worse-than-3rd-worldcountries-when-it-comes-to-mobile-data-access/ for an excellent analysis). Consumer pressure on the carriers brought the rates down. For example, some Canadians who live near the U.S. border are now buying American cellphones and a North American all-inclusive long-distance plan and adding data to it, and getting a better deal than they would in Canada.

The next wave of pressure may arrive when the Apple iPhone hits our shores. Americans get an iPhone with unlimited data for about US$60 per month and that may lead to a shake-up here: Apple likely does not want the carrier it chooses to charge such a premium over data rates in the U.S.

And of course RIM is not happy about the price situation—it wants to see the fastest adoption possible of its BlackBerrys before the iPhone arrives in Canada. Lower data rates would accelerate the market uptake of its smart phones. In a National Post article in July, RIM complained bitterly about high data prices. (See www.canada.com/nationalpost/ financialpost/story.html?id=383a1dd4- 7370-4db1-971f-a66d050110cb&k=87112.)

It was in response to all this that Bell introduced its unlimited access for $75 a month with either the Sierra Wireless AirCard 595 or the Novotel Wireless P720. Cards range in price from $100 to $300, depending on the contract. And it is about time Canadian data prices came down. We’ve still got a way to go but I predict that within the next year the plans will be competitive with the U.S.

Jim Harris is the author of the international bestseller Blindsided, published in 80 countries worldwide, and The Learning Paradox, nominated for the national business book award. E-mail him at jimh@jimharris.com