Well, that was fun! I just did a quick survey of G* Canada local distributors, using postal code info bryston provided.
Canada's postal codes are of the form
ANA (space) NAN
where A is an alphabetic character, N a numeric.
The first alphabetic character represents the province (or major part of a province in case of Ontario and Montreal)
For example V=British Columbia
The first number is a major subregion within a province, with zero assigned to rural areas, 1-9 assigned to urban. the subsequent characters further narrow the location with each subregion.
I just looked up the distributors for BC
using codes
V0A 1A1 through
V9A 1A1
at
216.94.60.168
and found 11 named companies with 19 locations in this random sample of British Columbia. The cities/towns of Burnaby, Chilliwerck(sp?), Hope, Kamloops, Kelowna, Langley, Powell River, Prince George, Quesnel, Richmond, Squamish, Vancouver, Victoria, and White Rock were all shown as having at least one local distributor in this (more or less) random survey. It's probably too much to hope that all of these distr's are really up and running, but it's a very encouraging list,imo.
By contrast Iridium's home page lists three distributors for all of Canada (to be fair, one of them is Bell Mobility, a very significant wireless operator)
I hope some of you will check out other provinces and report back:
A=Newfoundland & Labrador
B=Nova Scotia
C=Prince Edward Island
E= New Brunswick
G=Quebec
H= Metropolitan Montreal
J= Quebec West
K= Eastern Ontario
L=Central Ontario
M= Metropolitan Toronto
N=SW Ontario
P= N. ontario
R= Manitoba
S= Saskatchewan
T= Alberta
V= BC
X= NW Territories
Y= Yukon |
