Random thought - Divorcing your mobile service provider

The more I learn about the landscapes of our public spectrum in terms of mobile service providers, the more I find myself gravitating towards the words MONOPOLY and lack of choice. Where I live, in Toronto, the number of different cell phone service providers are limited. In fact the companies providing cellular services are predominantly divided into 2 major players, Rogers and Bell. If you ever were unsatisfied with their service your other company choices would be Telus or Fido with the unfortunate fact that you'd have to fork out an arm and a leg to buy out your, more then likely, 3 year contract. This has happened to me twice already and I find myself bouncing between companies for a lack of better options. I'm sure many can relate.

I was driving an insanely long drive to visit a friend of mine today, who lives in Oswego, NY, when I tuned into a very interesting American radio program that was talking about Google's recent activities in hopes to enter the telecommunications industry. Listening to this radio talk show sparked my interest in the issue, it reminded me of the grueling year long course I took in my final year of university called communication and the Internet. I managed to take notes with one hand and keep my eyes on the road (don't ask... apparently I can really multi-task and am passionate about consumer choice). Google has developed a new platform called Android which brings the Internet to mobile phones with usability like never before. On that same note, Google also intends on bidding an exceptionally high amount at the public spectrum bids to advocate for consumer choice when it comes to carriers for telecom services.

I am thrilled!!!!!! You can always count on Google... Google search, Google maps, Google scholar, etc. Google has been my answer to almost everything and now possibly even Google phone services. But I have to be realistic this activity is just buzzing in the States for now and even if it does move to Canada and other countries, it will probably be awhile before their service and technologies are perfected. So for now... i'm still stuck with Rogers.

**side note - although this post is extremely irregular compared to what I normally write about, I feel that this is worth sharing because it actually ties into a bigger issue which is "net neutrality", something we should all advocate for.