Totally agree. Rogers is being a total pain in the butt on this. They are to greedy to offer the voice or data plans required and are obviously colluding with Bell and Telus to keep them high.

I would love to see a new competitor that can compete on coverage and reliability and kick their collective butts.

Very frusterated.

My mandatory contract with Rogers ended several months ago, so I'm just treading water waiting to see who's offering the iPhone in Canada. They'll get my business. I don't think it's going to be Rogers.

Rogers is the worst company to deal with. My brother had nothing but problems with their internet and phone service, it took them over 2 weeks to set up his phone line when he moved. They said his internet will be hooked up the same day, nope. 2 weeks later and still no internet. So he phoned them, spent hours waiting for customer service, being transferred numerous times to different departments, it's no wonder why I hear people complaining about them all the time... they are a bunch of slackers, hence the iPhone not being released sooner through them. Hopefully another carrier will pick them up cause I do NOT want to do business with Roger ever!

Can't wait. Canadian has the WORST cell companies, with virtually zero competition to wake them up. Despite their attempts at spin doctoring a simple comparison to other countries shows how bad it is up here.

I cant wait! Rogers is going to pay big time for their damm smuggness....

As much as I really want another huge carrier to come in and kick the crap out of rogers I don't think Niagara Networks is going to be the one. Or T-mobile or At&t.

According to industry canada's website the company has withdrawn its $881 million bid.

http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/epic/site/smt-gst.nsf/en/sf08900e.html

My understanding that this spectrum auction is similar to the US spectrum auction that just occurred in the US, for the UHF TV channel space that is going digital. We are further behind in Canada and this will happen at least a year later in Canada than in the US.
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Someone may come in and bid on this, but the development time to create a coast-to-coast network in Canada will take a lot of time and money. This will not happen over night and due to the way Canada is situated geographically, would likely happen like Fido started out before Fido was bought by Rogers.
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Fido started as a metro cell company, operating in major metro cities and having zero coverage outside of those larger city centres. Anyone that operates strictly in the confines of that city is more or less fine, but venture just outside and your coverage drops to nothing. Fido solved this by offering an option for CDMA (Fido is GSM) with Telus and Bell in their coverage areas.
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Canada has about the population of California but is larger in size than all of the US. For 2002, our major city, Toronto, had a metro population of 5 million or so with Montreal at 3.5 million and Vancouver at 2.1 million. Ottawa/Hull is the only other city listed over a million population in 2002. Now those city sizes have increased due to general growth and metro area consolidation, but our cities are still so much smaller and spread out over a large territory. Canada is more like Australia in concept, just bigger in size and population, colder and with more beaches over-all but far fewer great beaches. Majority of Canada's population is within a hundred miles of the US border, Australias is within 100 miles of the coast in several large cities.
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(http://www.canadalegal.info/ref-canada-population/canada-stats-occupatio...)
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Anyone waiting for a new cell company to come to Canada, don't hold your breath. I'm not saying it won't happen, but whoever does, will lose LOTS of money getting started, will continue losing money while they try to get people to buy into their initially small service and people will have to put up with a lot to see it grow into something. If your company or you personally depend on your phone, this service level could kill you quickly. It is only long term that this makes sense for a new cell provider.
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One possibility would be 3G/4G GSM and CDMA technology merging so that Telus and Bell could offer iPhone service within Canada, but I don't see that happening any time soon. Another option might be newer technology such as the opening of devices into the spectrum, such as Google's Android, but it is unknown if these types of devices will be allowed into the Canadian mobile/cell space. However, Canada usually falls into the same spectrum usage patterns that the US uses, simply because we are so close that differing usage would tromp over the other, so we tend to cooperate in such matters.
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Either way, it would be a while before an official iPhone would make it into Canada except by way of Rogers. They have the proper network across Canada in place to service the iPhone and are serving jailbroken iPhones now.
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The only other viable option I see is a virtual cell phone MVNO operation, where someone buys time from Rogers to use Rogers network but is not otherwise associated with Rogers. This only works if Rogers doesn't charge an arm and a leg for access, and that is not likely to happen from everything I have heard about them.
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So, I wait on the outcome, having let my cell lapse with Bell, not wanting to get into a contract with anyone until something happens to allow me to make a better decision on getting a cell or simply going to get a Touch and worry about a cell with whomever. Oh well, I'm too busy on other things to worry about it right now anyway.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20080401.RWIRELESS01/TP...

Niagara Networks is no more.

AT&T has already made an incursion into Canada, as a Rogers partner.

What is now Rogers Wireless has at varous times been branded Cantel, Cantel AT&T, Rogers Cantel AT&T, and Rogers AT&T Wireless.

As you can see, Rogers has had some trouble getting their branding together, but you can also see that they have been somehow partnered with AT&T previously, and though I can't find the details on it now, it may have had something to do with a short term agreement to help Rogers launch their GSM network in Canada.

There is currently no relationship that I'm aware of between Rogers and AT&T, and AT&T is not active in the Canadian wireless landscape.

The CanTel brand has all but vanished, but my dad's first cell phone was a CanTel; big monster thing in a 10 pound shoulder bag, with a handset attached to it via a curly cable reminiscent of house phones. We kids were forbidden to use it, the rates were so high back then. But sometimes he let us pretend to talk on it when we drove past people so they'd all be like "look honey, those kids have a CAR phone!"

not happening!!!!!!!!!

Niagara pulled out of the auction process! there is no AT&T or T-Mobile coming to Canada,

The real problem is that Rogers is greedy. Very very greedy. Apple wants to offer plans that won't completely bankrupt Canadian iPhone owners and Rogers can't stand that idea. For those of you that don't know, data was collected about transferring 500MB of data wirelessly in several countries. Here are the results.

Please note that Fido is owned by Rogers.

http://www.thomaspurves.com/2007/04/09/canada-worse-than-3rd-world-count...

The delay seems to be the trademark issue with comwave. Niagra is out of the spectrum auction. Telus have come out with decent data plans. Rogers made millions on data last quarter and will probably have to change their other ridiculous data plans if they have an iPhone. However, Rogers is releasing the LG Vu next month which has a full html broswer, we will have to see what data plan can be used on that. But Rogers also has their MusicStore and load their phones up with a bunch of junk and branded stuff which Apple wont approve of. I think there is already 100,000 people in Canada who have the iPhone since it is so easy to unlock them.

http://www.iphoneuser.ca