Over at the Boy Genius Report, Joshua Karp reports that unlimited mobile data plans — well, singular, “plan” — are coming to Canada, courtesy of Bell Mobility, for the grand cost of $75 per month. Now, if this were completely true, it might have implications for how mobile devices were used (i.e. for true mobile computing), and even, perhaps, for the iPhone’s future in Canada. Having said that, there are some caveats to said plan, namely

a) that the “unlimited” plan requires you to have a PC Data card, so using it on a mobile phone is out of the question.

b) it is bound by “acceptable use” according to their Terms Of Service.

Now, you might roll your eyes and say *OF COURSE* its bound by their TOS. Everything else is, isn’t it? Well, if you read the Terms of Service real carefully, you’ll find that under section 19:

You shall not use or allow others to use the Service or your Device if such use:consumes excessive network capacity in Bell’s reasonable opinion, or causes our network, or our ability to provide services to others, to be adversely affected;is for multi-media streaming, voice over Internet protocol or any other application which uses excessive network capacity that is not made available to you by Bell;is to operate an email, web, news, chat or other service.

So who knows what Bell’s reasonable opinion is, but it sure looks like you won’t be making any VOIP calls using this service, watching “excessive” amounts of streaming video through YouTube, or possible exceed some magical ceiling. In fact, there are some reports that this ceiling amounts to a kingly sum of 250MB, which you only find out *after* you purchase the plan.

Its a known fact that Canadians are routinely paying more per megabyte for mobile transfers, and this is likely to continue until we start getting some real competition in this domain. Which is pretty unlikely at the moment as Canada is carved up into an oligarchy of non-competing media interests.

And this is a real pity, as stiflingly high mobile transfer rates mean that mobile computing — even as handheld — as a movement, isn’t likely to take off as it has in other parts of the world, iPhones not withstanding. In fact, things may not until we get a real “unlimited” plan that’s easily accessible to everyone.