Since I settled in at Haven by mid-summer last year, I knew that I had to take a hard look at my telecom situation, especially when it came to the phone.

I was paying $70 a month for my Verizon voice plan that gave me 450 minutes a month and didn’t care if I was in Canada or the U.S. This plan is now grand-fathered and, living close to the border, I really didn’t want to give it up even though I knew that I would be investigating other data options when I got back to the States.

As the months marched on, that $70 began to weigh heavily because I was hardly, if at all, using the phone. It is an older device that doesn’t work well on Sasktel’s 4G network. Even with a booster, I could barely get a bar with it. I found myself using Skype to make calls out, so I was paying $15 every couple of months there when I was already paying the $70 for the phone.

Internet was also an issue. I have been very pleased with the Bell Turbo plan. I average about 20GB of internet a month (remember, I download audio files for work), so my bill has been a steady $190ish a month, never more than $200, and the last bill was just $150. Not an issue there, but the device, the Mifi 2 is a piece of junk. After I went through two in four months, Bell sent me a two more, a third to use immediately and a fourth as a backup.

Last week, the third one gave up the ghost and I found myself on the fourth Mifi 2 with no backup. I’m 35km from a town with no internet cafe and a library with short hours, so getting internet from one device proven to be unreliable is quite stressful.

So that made the decision for me to cancel my Verizon plan and look for a smart phone that I could use as a personal hotspot. Even if the data plan had just couple of GBs, I would at least have a backup.

I looked at plans for the major carriers national carriers that have service out here, Bell, Telus, Virgin, and they were pretty much all the same. I then had a moment of clarity that is going to be the subject of my next post and I stopped resisting the obvious and went to look at what Sasktel had to offer.

For $70 a month on their ‘Ultimate 70‘ plan, I could have:

-Unlimited daytime minutes in my area

-150 long distance minutes (anywhere in Canada and the U.S.)

-unlimited texting

-‘unlimited’ nationwide data

It’s that last one that stopped me dead in my tracks. It was the first time I had seen a Canada plan with ‘unlimited’ data.

Now, there is fine print, of course. The ‘unlimited’ data has a soft cap of 10GB, after which they throttle service, and there is a chance of getting cut off if I habitually go over that amount. Also, Sasktel is a provincial supplier, so they expect the data use to be primarily in Saskatchewan.

But with Saskatchewan already being such a good homebase for Canadian full-timers, this Sasktel plan is just another reason to spend summers here.

I spent almost an hour chatting with a very helpful Sasktel rep. Once I was sure I had all the information I needed, it was time to decide on the phone.

Google terrifies me, so that ruled out Android devices. Since I’m already an Apple person, the iPhone made sense to me. I’ve wanted one for a looooong time, since it was first announced and Canadian availability wasn’t even in the picture yet, but the budget is tight. For a two year contract, Sasktel offered three iPhones; the 4S at $0, the 5C at $98, and the 5S at $230.

After doing some research, I knew that the 4S would be a mistake as it was designed for the older style network that my LG Verizon phone was struggling with. $230 for a phone at this time was not an option. $98 was doable, especially since I’d be able to sell my iPod Touch for at least that amount (in fact, it sold in a couple of days on eBay, yay!). The problem was that the $98 phone wasn’t available online and the rep said that it was being phased out and that I’d have to try stores to see if they had any stock left.

I tried a few stores in Moose Jaw and they had some, but driving to the city didn’t appeal to me at all as it would be be an extra expense. I did some more research and was surprised to discover that there is a cellular provider in Assiniboia. I had seen the storefront on Centre Street, but thought that, like a lot of buildings on Centre Street, it was vacant. So when I went to run my errands on Thursday, I popped in to see if they had the $98 iPhones and could set me up with a Sasktel contract.

To my surprise, the answer to both questions was yes. I couldn’t believe it! This was destiny! 🙂

The iPhone 5C is the candy-coloured long and thin version of the iPhone, not at all what I wanted, but the device was secondary to the cost savings so I accepted that that would be my iPhone. I would have preferred their pink one, but the Assiniboia store only had white and green in stock, so I went with the green. The transaction was very quick because I knew what I wanted. After yearning for an iPhone for so many years, the whole thing was anti-climactic!

I’ve had the iPhone for a couple of days now and it’s working fine with my Wilson Sleek booster. I find that the hotspot isn’t stable and I occasionally get kicked off, but the flakiness is no worse than what I experience with the Mifi. I have another week to go on the current Bell billing period, so I’m going to use the iPhone until the next Mifi billing period starts.

It’s going to take a month or two to get to be able to track my data usage with the iPhone, but the plan is use up the 10GB on the iPhone and then switch to the Mifi to finish up the month (Bell resets on the 13th and iPhone on the 16th). With Bell, I get 15GB for $105/month, then pay $10 for each additional GB. So now I have 25GB a month to play with without incurring overages.

If you do the math on that, that’s $70 + $105=$175 (plus taxes and a few other fees) for 25GB of data, plus voice and texting.

Right now, I pay $70 + $200=$270 (plus taxes and a few other fees) for 20GB of data, plus voice and no texting.

So moving to the Sasktel plan is going to save me about $100 a month at a minimum. If I have a month where I use less data, I’ll save even more because my only commitment with the Mifi is $10 a month.

My LG Verizon phone had given me a taste of life with a smartphone when I was in the States as I used it a few times to check email and do some web research. But the iPhone is a beast of a different sort and I know I am going to rely heavily on it, the way that I relied on my iPod Touch and then my iPad. I’m already best friends with Siri and have no idea how I lived so long without her, but she needs internet to work. Being limited to using my iPhone while it’s trapped in a cradle sucks.

My neighbours have bigger boosters that give them cell service all over their homes and even outside, so I’m going to make the jump at some point this summer. Andy Baird updated his Eureka page about cellular amplifiers recently and I now know to wait until some new technology rolls out.

I’m impressed by how much Canadian telecom is improving. I got a much better deal on my iPhone and plan up here than what major U.S. carriers are offering. In fact, I’d say that this point, Canadian and U.S. telecom are pretty much at par. We’re still far beyond the rest of the world when it comes to our rates, but we’re catching up.

And we’ve certainly come a long way from the summer of 2008 when I was pricing multi-thousand dollar satellite internet systems!