We have several choices of carriers in Canada, but most of them are called the big 3 for a reason. Bell, Rogers and Telus. They also have their subsidiaries; Virgin, Fido and Koodoo. While those are the principal choices, you do have other alternatives to them such at Freedom Mobile, Chatr, Public Mobile. Granted Public Mobile is a combination of the big 3 and Chatr is a sub-brand of Rogers as well.
So this leaves Freedom Mobile which is part of Shaw since the acquisition. This essentially is the only one carrier service that isn't part of the conglomerate that the others belong to. It's also a smaller network that is drastically expanding in some metro areas such as Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa.
I switched due to cost, 2 smartphones both of which have a plan and need data was $210+taxes/month on Bell. Crazy right? I'll break it down so that you get a good idea of what that $210 meant;
- $75 is for my unlimited Canada-Wide calling and unlimited Can/US texting, voicemail and all the bling.
- $65 for 7GB shared data a month.
- $70 is for my other smartphone plan which offers unlimited Canada-Wide calling and unlimited Can/US testing, voicemail etc.
Now to this, you can add all the extra fees, taxes and voilà you get $237.30.
Fast forward to Freedom Mobile $59 plan;
Home Network
- 8GB of full-speed data (6GB + 2GB bonus).
- Unlimited talk to Canada and the U.S.
- Unlimited global text, picture and video messaging and all the extras.
Away Network
- 1GB of full-speed data.
- 2400 minutes of talk to Canada and the U.S.
- Unlimited global text.
This ends up being $67.66 with taxes and if you double that, it comes to $135.32. I'm having savings of $101.98 a month. In the end, even if I ended up paying a little extra because I went over my “Away” usage I'd still come out of it with savings.
It's also very important to know that when you know you'll be leaving the “Home Zone” as Freedom refers to, you'll need to access your settings and change your cellular network to automatically pick up the “Away” one and be sure to activate the “Data Roaming” if you intend to use the allocated data of your plan.
