Whenever someone set up new phone service, whether wireline or wireless, there as always the possibility of being given a recycled number. On the old PSTN, phone companies usually held disconnected numbers for about 3 months before putting them back into service. This meant that a new customer that was allocated that number would receive periodic calls intended for the former owner. This is much more of a problem
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I’ve noticed that Bell Canada has recently lowered its bandwidth caps on some of its high speed internet plans. I’m not sure when this happened but do recall that the higher end plans, which now have bandwidth caps of 30 GB per month, were up at around 100 GB last time I looked (perhaps a year ago?). Bell does state that the cap “applies to new clients without a term agreement; $1.00/additional GB,
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Futurephone.com is offering free long distance to a couple of dozen international destinations for people who already have free US long distance or a bucket of minutes they can utilize for US long distance. No VOIP adapters or softphones required. Instead, callers make a phone call to an IOWA phone number and are then provided with a dial-tone to dial internationally. Right now the company appears to be trying to
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Canada’s telecommunications regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), reaffirmed an earlier decision to continue to regulate what the major telephone companies can charge for VOIP services – at least until the incumbent telephone companies lose 25% of their market share. In doing so, it ignored the government’s desire to allow free market forces to play a bigger role. From the Globe and Mail.

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Since I last surveyed Canadian options for high speed wireless data:

- Rogers has raised the cap on its top EDGE plan (C$100) from 100 MB to 200 MB
- Bell and Telus have imposed caps (250 MB) on their EVDO 1x plans (C$100) which can be expected to provide better performance than currently available EDGE technology

Meanwhile, the US cellular carriers continue to offer uncapped high speed data plans at lower rates than their Canadian counterparts:

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As TechDirt again reminds us all, just because a carrier says their service is UNLIMITED in large letters doesn’t mean it isn’t subject to bandwidth and usage caps that can result in the service being cut off for unsuspecting users. Wireless Broadband services are not really a substitute for DSL.

According to the Business 2.0 Blog, the people who brought us Napster and Skype now want to bring us a peer-to-peer television service. While there are already a number of TV over-the-internet services already available, a P2P based service would save on the huge bandwidth costs.