After testing a Freedom Mobile SIM card last fall, I learned that the carrier could comfortably work in Toronto and at my parents’ house outside of Ottawa in a town called Renfrew. Then, on Black Friday (when I always do cell plan shopping), Freedom Mobile offered the best deal on a plan with Canada and U.S. Data ($45 for 50GB), so I decided to do a longer-term test throughout 2024.
Ten months later, I really don’t have anything bad to say about my experience. Instead, I am walking away happy that I can easily swap from any of the networks owned by Bell, Telus, Rogers, or Freedom (Owned by Videotron) without having to worry about hitting dead zones in places where all my friends have usable service.
A few years ago, most Freedom plans included 1-5GB of nationwide data on top of the 10-50GB of data for use on Freedom’s home networks. That all changed in 2023 when Videotron purchased the carrier and rolled out its current data structure, which includes nationwide coverage by default. As of the time of writing, many Freedom plans also include data in Canada and the U.S.; some even include data for Mexico.
How it went
For my day-to-day living in Toronto, Freedom has been a viable option for years, and up until more recently, was actually the only carrier that had service in some of the city’s subway tunnels. Two of my friends have been on Freedom since before it switched to nationwide, and they didn’t really seem to have any complaints. However, my parents living in a small town and the handful of camping trips I do every year always held me back from the once-regional carrier. Now that I’ve used it, I really can’t complain about the data speeds in Toronto. It’s always fast enough, and I’ve never found myself waiting long for things to download or post.
My first real test of the phone was earlier this summer when I went back to Massasauga Provincial Park to go camping. When I was there last summer, I was on Telus’ network and had usable service in most places throughout the park. This year, when I went there with Freedom, I was still able to use my data, but I will say that compared to my partner on Virgin, my data was slower, and I wasn’t able to stream things like TikTok or Instagram Reels like she could. That being said, I’m not that upset about only having slow-ish internet speeds when camping.
My second camping trip was in the Haliburton region below Algonquin Park, and again, I was able to use my data where we camped. This wasn’t super remote either, but once again, my data wasn’t super fast compared to some others on the trip, but it was still usable.
The only other note I would mention is that I also travelled to the U.S. a few times with this plan, and beyond accidentally burning all my data to watch a super crispy version of Ocean’s 11, which ultimately led to me getting scammed on a recent trip, I found it to work well. If I can stream Ocean’s 11 at 84 Mbps while roaming as a hotspot, I won’t complain.
The final note I’ll mention is that if you do switch to Freedom, you need to go into your phone’s cellular settings and turn roaming on all the time. This allows Freedom to give all users much better coverage than before. Since I have Canadian and U.S. data, I didn’t need to worry about any roaming settings when travelling.
Overall, I have no real complaints about my time with Freedom. If you want the fastest networks in most places, I still think Bell, Telus and Rogers will offer better connections, but for most people, Freedom is definitely a very viable alternative. If I wasn’t planning to switch again this Black Friday to test another network, I would happily stay on Freedom’s network as long as it continues to offer the best mobile networking deals.
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