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I thought it was strange a few months ago when Virgin Mobile Canada announced that they’d offer post-paid plans. After all, the company is built around creating a viable prepaid service — no contracts, no credit checks. In the U.S., they base their marketing around this. However, it seems that they’ve reached the saturation point in the Canadian prepaid market, and are looking to expand to contract service. They claim to “take the ‘con’ out of contracts,” but as we all know, there are surefire cons along the way.

This is normally where I’ll throw in a quote from an executive. There are actually four in this press release, but this one is by far the most powerful:

“One of the most exciting innovations of our revolutionary new service is myTime(TM). In a North American first, Virgin Mobile customers will be able to
choose the hour when their unlimited calling clock begins, rather than being told when it starts. For people who want the flexibility to choose the morning time, day time or any other time that’s right for them to make their calls, this is the perfect choice - and it’s only available with Virgin Mobile,” said Black.

To me, this means a greater reason to ditch your landline. You can review your call patterns and determine when “free” would be best for you. So I’d choose between 1 p.m. and, say, 8 p.m., if I got a block that long, because I could then do a lot more with my afternoon that I can’t do with Skype.

An alternative to the block of unlimited calling is to receive unlimited local talking and texting with five friends. They’re calling it myCrew. Please, for once, can we just lay it out as “My Crew” and not try to riff off of myFaves?

Beyond the basics, mobile we is $7 per month and 2,500 texts is $10. They say there are no “exorbitant” cancellation fees. That’s something we’ll explore when we update our Virgin Mobile Canada review. Once we do that, we’ll report back and let you know if it really is a decent deal or not.

[CNW Group]

Posted By : Joe
Posted at : February 14th, 2008 - 8:53 am
Filed under : Canadian Wireless