Quebecor’s Freedom Mobile today unveiled its new nationwide 5G and 4G plans, expanding the latter’s coverage in various Canadian cities thanks in part to a recent CRTC wholesale roaming decision.
A new plan worth mentioning is the company’s $65/50GB plan (after Digital Discount) that offers unlimited data, talk, and text across Canada, the United States, and Mexico. A similar roaming offering from Rogers costs $105 per month, which is a $40/month difference.
The Freedom Mobile plan is 38% cheaper than the Rogers plan. Telus and Bell have yet to match as their Canada-US plans don’t show Mexico yet. Freedom also has a $50/40GB Canada-US plan on 5G to go with a regular $45/30GB 5G plan.
The new Freedom Mobile roaming plan offers 50GB of data at full 5G speeds where available and 4G speeds (up to 100 Mbps) on partner networks in the U.S. and Mexico, and the end result are no overage charges while on your vacation.
Once customers exhaust their full-speed data bucket, they will continue to enjoy data services without any additional fees. However, the speed throttles to 256 kilobits per second for downloads and 128 kilobits per second for uploads on the Freedom Network. On partner networks in Nationwide, the U.S., and Mexico, it is further throttled to 128 kilobits per second for downloads and 64 kilobits per second for uploads until the end of the current billing cycle.
This reduced speed still supports applications like web browsing, email, instant messaging, voice over IP services, and low-quality audio streaming. Even applications that usually require higher bandwidth, like video streaming or peer-to-peer file sharing, continue to work, albeit with potentially affected performance due to slower speeds, says Freedom Mobile.
For now, 5G plans in Canada are only available from Rogers, Telus (and Public Mobile) and Bell (and Virgin Plus) and now Freedom Mobile, to join Videotron. It’s only a matter of time before Rogers’ Fido and Telus’ Koodo will have to offer 5G plans as well to keep up with rivals.
Since April 2023, Freedom says it “has already lowered the competition’s prices by more than 30% across Canada”, citing plan prices from February 10, 2023.
