I have been trying to do a lot of research lately about potentially switching over to a data phone with the new network that is coming here in Vancouver. Of course, that means high end phones like the iPhone is going to be available with a lot of carriers now.

I was just looking at the phone plans though and they all seem like highway robbery. Example, for the iPhone it looked like for say a 150 minute plan you would be looking at paying at minimum $50/month. You don’t even get features like a caller ID too. It’s a far cry from like the 300+ minutes and a bunch of features I get for about $20 right now.

I always thought a cell phone bill should stay under $50 unless you are truly using it to replace things like your home phone or you use it like every second in your life. Usually you can get really good inside deals by requesting for them. But since this network is so new it will probably take awhile to see some good deals.

With the release the Palm Pre recently I was thinking whether or not I would want to buy something like that as for my next cell phone purchase I was thinking of a data phone. I never was too into the iPhone hype personally and another reason was that there was only one carrier that was capable of serving it here.

While researching about the phones I just remembered that two of the big cell phone service providers here, Telus and Bell, are going to upgrade its network using High Speed Packet Access (HSPA). And as it turns out, apparently right here in Vancouver we’ll get to test this out at around as early as September.

Without the technical jargon, this potentially means that this may change a lot of the cell phone fee structures for the better. At the same time, the main reason I thought about this is that my contract is expiring at around November. Usually companies try to get you to commit to yearly contracts months before your contract expires to ensure that you will stay as a customer.

However, in this case you may want to try and hold off and see what happens if you are a Canadian resident. The good thing is that I will still have a few months to compare everything before my contract expires.