Who’s Sick of Paying a $200 Phone Bill? ?

Canada’s Freedom Mobile is getting ready to compete more seriously against Rogers, Bell Mobility and Telus than when the company was Wind Mobile.

Freedom Mobile is the new Wind Mobile, the mobile career that Bell, Rogers and Telus couldn’t wait to squash. Now that Shaw Communications owns the company, and is growing its LTE network in major cities around the country, it’s becoming a much bigger force to be reckoned with.

The Freedom Mobile LTE network is expanding in all directions from the cores of Toronto and Vancouver this week, and the alternative mobile carrier has plans to launch the same high-speed service in Edmonton and Calgary later this summer.

The phones that Freedom Mobile has are the biggest impediment to growth since the company launched its network last year. Starting with just one high-end phone, the LG V20, and one budget option, the ZTE Grand X 4, the line is quickly growing as Freedom’s Band 66 becomes standard in all upcoming releases. By the end of 2017, every phone in North America should support Band 66 as it supports Band 4 today, since the subset of airwaves is just an expansion of the existing AWS standard. In plainspeak, this means that your iPhone should be able to support Band 66 by the end of 2017 and greatly reduce your phone bill.

Check it out: 6GB of full-speed for $69 per month.

 

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Where in Canada will get LTE service?

Starting November 27, Freedom Mobile will operate an LTE network in the cores of Toronto and Vancouver, expanding to the outlying regions of each city by the spring of 2017.

By summer of 2017, Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa will be LTE-enabled, and Freedom hopes to have negotiated LTE roaming deals with its domestic roaming partners (namely, Bell and Rogers) for when customers are not connected to its Home network.

Finally, by the fall of 2017, all of Southwestern and Southeastern Ontario — where there are towers — will be LTE-enabled.

What are the plans available right now?

Freedom Mobile is taking an early adopter strategy for its LTE network, likely because it knows how limited it is at first. Not only is there only one plan available right now, but it’s different, and slightly more expensive (naturally) than the rest of the company’s plans.

The LTE plan is regularly $45 and includes 3GB of data, unlimited Canadian calling and global texting, but for a limited time the price drops to $40 and the data allotment is doubled to 6GB, which is pretty good.

Here is everything you need to know about Freedom Mobile.