Aingaran's Tech and Biz Blog

Wind Mobile, the new Canadian wireless carrier operating in Toronto and Calgary is offering $150 to customers of their competitors.

If you’re a customer of any other Canadian wireless carrier (Rogers, Telus, Bell, Fido and etc..) Wind Mobile will give you a bill credit of $150 upon switching your cell phone service to Wind. The credit will be applied to your account over the course of 5 months in $30 denominations monthly.

This may sound like a great deal, but for many who are already in contracts with their existing carriers, it’s not such a great deal.

Things to consider:
Phone
You must purchase a handset that’s compatible with the Wind Mobile network. The cheapest phone available from Wind is $130. After you’ve purchased a phone that’ll work, the $150 credit will be down to $20.

Coverage
Coverage is limited to Toronto and Calgary. If you wish to use the phone outside of the area (assuming it works) you will be billed roaming charges.

If you currently do not have a contract with your current provider or are on pay and talk, this might be a good deal for you.

Telus is currently experiencing a network wide Data and SMS outage in Ontario on CDMA and IDEN (Mike) networks.

Most users affected will see lower case 1xev instead of the normal 1XEV.

Telus Blackberry users will not be able to send or receive email, BB Messenger, PIN, Facebook messages.

UPDATE: As of 9:53AM, the issue should be resolved.

A bettery pull should get the device back up and running.

UPDATE II: It appears as if only Data is back up and running. SMS issues are still on-going.

UPDATE III: Everything appears to be up and running as of this afternoon.

Ok, so it’s not Blackberry Messenger for iPhone, but it’s the closest thing. What’s App is an instant messaging client for iPhones and Blackberry smartphones.

WhatsApp is a smartphone-to-smartphone messenger/chat application. WhatsApp allows you to carry on a conversation in real time with your mobile contacts without having to pay for SMS. WhatsApp Messenger is currently available for iPhone and BlackBerry and yes, iPhone and BlackBerry owners can message each other!

I’ve been using it for a while now, and I must admit it’s a pretty neat application.

It’s $0.99 USD for the iPhone and $2.99 USD for the Blackberry.

Many Telus and Bell 3G (Apple iPhone, Blackberry Bold, HTC Hero) users experienced a 4 hour outage in the Greater Toronto Area yesterday.

Service was resumed last night. The cause of is the issue still remains unknown, but Telus says it was caused by a “3rd party vendor”.

All users are advised to perform a soft reset on their handset.

A new report from Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society says,

“Our company-level pricing study for the highest-speed offers in the countries we observe here locates all of the Canadian companies but one in the cluster with the slowest speeds and highest prices,”

“Canada continues to see itself as a high performer in broadband, as it was early in the decade, but current benchmarks suggest that this is no longer a realistic picture of its comparative performance on several relevant measures.”

A report that appears to be pulled out of the air and not based on facts, from the CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission) last year found that Canada was a broadband leader among G7 nations.

More on the report

It appears Bell is getting rid of their overstocked CDMA device lineup.

They’ve listed the Blackberry Storm 9530 for $249 on a month-to-month (no contract) purchase.

Details

Just a week after Google announced they’re building a Gigabit broadband network in the US, Shaw announced they’re testing their own Gigabit broadband network in Canada.

Details…

Here’s instructions on how to setup e-mail so that you are able to send/receive e-mails using shaw e-mail accounts while on WiFi and/or Telus 3G.

1. Turn ON and connect to WiFi.
2. Setup the Videotron e-mail using Videotron ‘s outgoing mail server as SMTP (relais.videotron.ca).
3. Test in and out going e-mail using Videotron e-mail account on WiFi.
4. Turn OFF WiFi
5. Add secondary outgoing mail servers.

1. Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars
2. Click on the e-mail account that was setup in step 1.
3. Click on the Hostname (relais.videotron.ca) under Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP)
4. Click on “Add Server…” under Other SMTP Servers Example:
   Hostname: relais.videotron.ca
   Username: blank
   Password: blank
   SSL: Off
   Port: 25

6. Add smtp.telus.net as an Other SMTP server (You will have 2 records of relais.videotron.ca — Primary and Other)

1. Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars
2. Click on the e-mail account that was setup in step 1.
3. Click on the Hostname (smtp.telus.net) under Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP)
4. Click on “Add Server…” under Other SMTP Servers Example:
   Hostname: smtp.telus.net
   Username: blank
   Password: blank
   SSL: Off
   Port: 25

7. The KEY STEP! Turn the Primary Server — OFF
   You should now have multiple “Other STMP Servers” with the ON status and the Primary SMTP server status must be OFF!
8. Test using WiFi ON and OFF and you should be able to send/receive e-mails without problems!