Thanks. Didn't know that. Fido has had deceptive advertising (not as bad as
Air Canada though) so one never knows what the real total amount is for a
package advertised at a certain monthly amount.

What is not clear to me is to how many points on the Telus landline Fido
connects to. If they funnel all calls through one Telus CO, then that is a
problem. Lets say everyone in Vancouver were to switch to Fido. The Telus COs
in suburbs would become unused, while the one CO to which Fido connects would
crumble because it is as if all of Vancouver moved into the same neighbouhood.

So as long as CityFido is considered a "novelty", then they can probably
adjust a CO's capacity to cope with it. But at one point, Telus will tell Fido
"enough is enough" and will want Fido to start to split its network between
multiple landline COs.

I am not so worried about air interface capacity. They can split cells and
make full use of Microcell's allocated spectrum. My worry is with the landline
network connection. So far, almost all the "complaints" we heard here seemed
to point to Telus overload, not to a Microcell overload.

For customers, yes.

But for Fido in the  medium term, I am not so sure. Short term , it is good
because it pleases Bay Street. But consider that CitiFido may end up costing a
lot to Fido due the need to rapidly increase capacity in Vancouver, and they
may divert previous money from improvements in other cities. Remember that
when people talk more, they dont generate more revenus, but Fido has to spend
money to increase capacity.

In the long term though, assuming Microcell becomes as profitable as a
landline telco, then yeah, this will be good. Telcos make money because their
infrastructure has been built up, paid for and customer growth is
small/manageable. Eventually, Microcell will have reached its market share
limit and won't need to grow (significantly) anymore and at that point, each
$45 will be pure profit. It is getting to that point that is a big question mark.

It depends on where you call. For example,  incoming calls on Fido while in Mexico are $3.50/min while with Rogers it's $2.98/min.

Where do you live?

Went though the Fido web site, They have a FAQ on the MMS service.

Basically, it is $0.25 surcharge for each MMS message sent, but no surcharge
for MMS message received. Both pay the normal GRPS data consumption charges.
(But the recipient can refuse delivery of the "package" - the notice of a
package being available is free however).

Sending MMS to an email address is not yet supported by microcell. (I find
this interesting; if they bother installing the MMS gateway software/hardware,
wouldn't that include the email gateway out of the box ?)

Not sure how sending an email with attachement from the handset compares with
sending the same attachement via MMS in terms of GPRS bandwidth consumed. (in
an email, the attachement is encoded in base64 which requires roughly 25% more
bytes to send) ( each 8 bit byte sent over the line carries only 6 bits of the
original document).

MMS is limited to 50 documents.
So, a 50k document encoded as base64 requires 66.6k. This means 16 k for the
base64 encoding overhead. At $0.03 per kilobyte, this is roughly $0.50

So, unless you have spare bandwidth on your GPRS package, and *IF* MMS sends
the data "raw" without encoding, it would mean that sending an email via MMS
(when available) will end up costing less even with the $0.25 surcharge.

Oh, and while Fido now has the software to support WAP-Push, they have not
upgraded their proxy server to the internet to carry the WAP specific HTTP
headers that provide some identification of the subscriber which is needed by
the remote site to send back a WAP Push response to that customer. (usually,
that subscriber ID is some random number assigned to a customer).