No man is an island… or is it no Canadian carrier is an island? I can never remember.
Only days after TELUS launched its new Your Choice plans, adding two new voice plan tiers while reducing overall data allowance, Rogers and Bell have followed suit in their own ways.
Bell has launched a series of non-shareable promotional plans that mimic TELUS’s entry-level plans for more expensive smartphones like the iPhone 6 and Galaxy Note 4.
The first, dubbed Voice & Data Plus Promo 70, offers the exact experience as TELUS’s least-expensive option, which works out to be $50 for 300 local minutes and $20 for 300MB of data. Voice & Data Plus Promo 80 changes the breakdown to $50 for 300 local minutes and $30 for 1.5GB of data, also in line with TELUS’s new data pools.
Rogers also has a new $70 entry-level plan, but unlike Bell’s it’s a regular fixture of the Share Everything product and doesn’t reduce the lowest data tier.
The new $10/250MB option does two things: it offers, like TELUS, a $70 MSR (minimum spend requirement) for premium smartphone customers, and it lets Rogers boast that it offers more value in the higher-cost tiers, since its $20 option still provides 500MB. The carrier still doesn’t offer flexible voice tiers, at least not with its share plans, so it clearly sees value in continuing to differentiate with unlimited voice and text.
The other major price discrepancy between the Big Three carriers continues to be how much they charge for BYOD. TELUS has the lowest monthly cost at $40 per line, followed by Bell at $45 and Rogers at $50.
It’s interesting seeing how Rogers and Bell have responded here: they don’t seem to be taking the same approach as in previous years.
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