Rogers has just launched another wireless carrier to compete with the new generation of cheap cellular providers, a la WIND and Moblicity. It’s called Chatr, and it will offer a $45/month plan featuring unlimited talk/texting Canada-wide.
We’re getting into an interesting stage where we have three levels of carriers. Rogers/Telus/Bell for the expensive end, Fido/Solo/Koodoo/Virgin for the mid-range end, and now this budget-oriented grouping of WIND/Chatr/Moblicity.
The thing is though that nothing changes between these carriers except price. It’s like shopping at Food Basics instead of Metro: it’s owned by the same people, and they sell the same stuff, but one is cheap and one is pricey. If it wasn’t for the CRTC opening up Canada’s wireless sector to competition, WIND would not exist and Roger’s would have been content to not implement something like Chatr.
Instead, we now have competition. And we all win.