Rogers is set to introduce a tablet financing plan aimed at making it easier for customers to purchase a connected slate without huge upfront costs.
The company realized that customers weren’t willing to buy tablets on the same multi-year contracts as their smartphone peers, largely because tablet plans don’t derive the same high-cost voice & data ARPU, necessitating less generous carrier subsidies.
When the transition to share plans happened in mid-2013, Rogers began moving away from subsidized tablets, choosing instead to offer data as a $10/month add-on to any shared plan.
Now that the data portion is settled — Rogers still offers flex data tiers for non-shared plans — the company is set to begin financing tablets to make their high costs easier to stomach.
TELUS began financing tablets way back in 2012, before the elimination of three-year contracts. In its current incarnation, TELUS finances up to $480 of the tablet’s upfront cost, and customers pay $20 back over the course of two years. Bell has a similar offering dubbed Easy Purchase, which also subsidizes up to $480 over two years.
If that sounds familiar, it should: phone contracts now work the exact same way (with a few small differences). Bell and TELUS customers choose a data package with that plan, and need to only pay back the outstanding balance of the tablet to cancel the service.
While we don’t have specific details of Rogers’ financing plans, they’re likely to look quite similar to TELUS’ and Bell’s. Rogers, Bell and TELUS offer flexible data tiers that begin at $5/month for 10MB of data, rising to between $40 and $45 for 5GB.
Rogers’ financing plan is likely to be called Easy Pay, and will be rolling out soon to consumers and small businesses.
