After the Federal Ministry of Industry, Tony Clement, scrapped a government-sponsored cell phone plan comparison tool, just a few weeks before launch but after spending $1.4 million on it, it looks like someone else has stepped up to the challenge of filling this void.

Enter Cellplanexpert.ca

They keep track of the 4000 some odd different plans available for all of the big Canadian cell phone providers, like Bell, Rogers and Telus. How the heck 4000 different plans could possibly exist for a phone can only be explained by uncompetiiveness. This isn't choice, this is confusion and unnecessary complexity. How many different plans are there for local phone service?

CellPlanExpert.ca has been working on this for a looong time now, so it is a very sophisticated product.

Basically, you input your expected cell phone usage, including what times of day you use your minutes, how much of your usage is to the same 5 telephone numbers, what amount of dialed vs. received calls you make, etc.

As I said, the Canadian cell phone companies have tried their hardest to structure their plans in a complicated fashion to make tools like this difficult to make and use, for example, different discounted evening cutoff times (6PM, 7PM, 8PM, 9PM, etc?). But cellplanexpert.ca has definitely done what they can to make reasonable approximations regarding these situations. Good for them!

When you're filling out the forms, you can either make your own estimates for your own usage, or better yet, pull out your previous detailed bills and add up the numbers to get the best plan recommendations possible based on your past usage.

They don't yet include Blackberry, text messaging or Smartphone plans, but I'm sure that is just a matter of time. The recent media interest in their service should provide them with decent traffic and revenue we all hope!

Just remember to make sure you investigate any corporate plans you may have available to you (or people you know), as they won't show up in their database.

Cell Plan Expert Revenue Model

CellPlanExpert is currently in free beta right now. In my opinion, it looks more like a final-stage release candidate rather than a beta. The owner states that it might one day cost some amount to use, as "He believes taking advertising money from cellphone companies would taint the independence of the tool, so he's looking at introducing some sort of user-fee system." I do somewhat disagree with this however, as advertising systems such as Google Adsense completely abstract a webmaster from the advertising that will be served on the site. For example, I have no idea what advertising on this page is being served to you, so how could that possibly taint me?

But certainly, there is the possibility that the higher-cost providers would pull their advertising budgets (even through Adsense) on a site that impartially shows the very same advertiser to be a bad deal.

Having said that, I don't think direct advertising deals for products that are related to cell phones would taint their tool, like an advertisements for new Blackberry models, or calling-card-based long-distance. Heck, CellPlanExpert asks if someone is a student in order to figure out what student plans they may be eligibile for, so advertising unrelated to cell phones could be targeted based on that. If the new Canadian cell phone providers come out with decent plans, I'd have nothing against a tie-up with CellPlanExpert.ca, as I think their experience with these plans means they know whether a plan is a good one or terrible one.

It is possible that advertising alone wouldn't raise enough revenue to cover the costs they've incurred, and I can't fault them for that, they've surely put tons of effort into their product.