I've seen things about the pay increase recently, but it doesn't specify if it's for all or just those in the big stores. Although it's not much, any increase is better than not.
The other day, I saw a clip where Jack goes to the Asgard homeworld after he stuck his head in the Ancient repository. They clearly had a Milky Way gate (or a variant of it). Other than travelling to Earth, I can't remember any other mentions of the Asgard using one.
So was that the only one they had in their galaxy? Possibly only used to keep in contact with their Milky Way allies. Or is there a gate network in the Ida galaxy? I had the theory that maybe the seed ships passed through, and that's how the two races originally met.
So if they do have a gate network, were they upgraded to something similar to the Pegasus gate, and they only kept the one Milky Way gate because the network was locked out like the Pegasus network? Keeping a Milky Way gate would allow them to get around the lockout.