Just when you thought Canada's wireless industry had all agreed (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) to "pricing stability", Virgin Mobile Canada comes and wrecks the party by offering a new pre-paid plan featuring 10¢ a minute calls (plus a 40¢ a day fee). It's a huge drop given Virgin was charging 25¢ for the first five minutes and 15¢ afterwards. So what does it mean? For one, the CEOs of the big three- Telus, Bell Mobility and and Rogers - probably had a collective temper tantrum, crossed Virgin Canada CEO Andrew Black of their Christmas lists and did some ARPU recalculations. As for Virgin, it's difficult to tell what it means. The 10¢ a minute plan - known as Day2Day - is part of the Virgin U.S. rate package so the Canadian offering is not new. Then again, you hear so little about how Virgin is doing in Canada - partly because the target audience is the teen set and that's a demographic I have no insight into. If you talk to Rogers and Telus, they'll tell you their pre-paid sales have not been affected but I wouldn't expect them to say otherwise.

Apologies for title's reference to the theme song from the Mary Tyler Moore Show, but when will people stop saying "Sure RIM is a great company but there are only xx million Blackbery users?". Maybe today is the day after RIM said it expects to have five million subscribers by end of fiscal 2006 while sales will be about $2-billion. Say what you will about the Treo 700w, et al but the Blackberry remains the standard for mobile e-mail. Things could really interesting if RIM can upgrade the Blackberry's telephone and Web browser. Going back to my riff earlier this week on the all-in-one wireless device, what about the idea of a Treo iPod that would feature Treo's strong calendar, contact and Web browser features with the 4GB or 6GB of iPod goodness? Do you think Palm and Steve Jobs can ever dance now that Palm is dating Microsoft - even if Palm CEO Ed Colligan is giving away Bill Gates' cell phone numbers to anyone who wants it.

VoIPSupply.com has reached out to Canadian consumers with the launch of canadianvoipstore.com. Aside from selling in Canadian dollars, the site will offer more than 1,000 different SKUs. Given Voxilla moved into Canada earlier this year, perhaps it's a sign the market is expected to gain strong momentum now that Rogers, Bell, Shaw, Cogeco and Videotron are offering service - along with Vonage, AOL, BabyTel, Primus, etc. (The only one missing from the party is Telus but they've got a pesky strike to resolve). According to Seaboard Group, there will be 4.02 million VoIP subscribers by 2008 compared with 417K by the end of this year. Montreal-based BabyTel, which aside from desperately needs a new name, recently moved into the U.S. market.

Given it's been in beta since August, no one should be surprised by the launch of Skype 1.4, which offers ways for users to personalize the service with ringtones, sounds and photos. The most interesting part of the press release is that Skype has signed up another two million users since the eBay deal, an now has more than 56 million. The software been downloaded nearly 175 million times.