Some news items of note related to Canada's last-standing upstart carrier (because Vidéotron is only available in Québec):

iPhone 8 Promotion

Freedom is once again offering the iPhone 8 for $0 down with their 10GB monthly plan. To be clear, this is a hardware deal only; you can get the 10GB data-only plan (plus unlimited global SMS) with any phone, including your own. What you also get with this deal is a $929 CAD 64GB iPhone 8 for only $360—that is, $15/month for 24 months. Not bad.

Freedom Coming Soon to The Mobile Shop

A pilot project will see Freedom plans and devices available at 13 Loblaws, Real Canadian Superstore and T&T locations, through existing kiosks branded as The Mobile Shop. I had always assumed that these kiosks were owned and operated directly by the Big Three; in this case I'm happy to have been proven wrong.

Shaw Earnings Call

Shaw Communications, FM's parent company, will be holding their quarterly earnings call today at 9am Eastern. If there's anything newsworthy to report I'll do just that via the Howard Forums news round-up later this afternoon.

And Finally...

Not to be a Debbie Downer or anything but I feel obliged to disclose that I'm no longer a Freedom Mobile customer. Along with the expected issues pertaining to signal penetration into the back rooms of restaurants and basements, my girlfriend and I have been noticing increasingly bad latency even where the signal is strong.

Here's the part where you say: "I told you so..."

Sources: iPhone in Canada (1) (2), Shaw Newsroom

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... Either that, or the Koodo rep I spoke to made a big mistake.

I guess everyone reading this is sitting pretty on their 10GBs from last December's holiday miracle; nobody on Howard Forums seems to be talking about a spring promotion being offered by Canada's Big Three flanker brands. I first heard about it at my local Best Buy, and confirmed it with a visit to both Koodo and Virgin Mobile kiosks yesterday. It might only apply to Ontario.

The current rate cards for BYOD plans are still identical for Fido, Koodo and Virgin Mobile, but... if you take a plan with 1GB or more of data they will add an additional 3GB to your plan. In other words:

1GB becomes 4GB for $50/month
3GB becomes 6GB for $60/month
5GB becomes 8GB for $70/month
8GB becomes 11GB for $85/month

The 10GB plans probably get an extra 3GB as well, but nobody should have to pay over a hundred bucks for their cell phone plan. Come on...

For me Fido wasn't really in the running, only because the Bell/Telus network has proven to be significantly faster in downtown Toronto. So my first stop at the mall was at a Virgin Mobile kiosk. Everything was as expected, including the egregious data overage rate of $7 per 100MB that has apparently become the new standard. But there's one peculiar aspect to Virgin's Roam Sweet Roam service—for the daily roaming fee you don't actually get access to your data bucket, but instead an allowance of a mere 100MB. Despite being a big fan of local SIM cards while travelling this didn't sit well with me, so on I went to Koodo.

I'll cut to the chase: the big difference with Koodo's promotion is that the 3GB data bonus is only good for 24 months, whereas with Virgin it will remain on your account until you change your plan. So even with the meager data bucket while roaming, Virgin Mobile is definitely the better choice. I hope this helps anyone in the market for a new plan. I haven't seen these bonus data promos advertised anywhere, even on the carriers' websites, but for Ontarians they are definitely available, so grab one while you can.

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I can still remember the early 2000s, those dark days before the arrival of the modern smartphone, when I could visit the magazine section of my local book shop and more often than not find some sort of buyer's guide for mobile phones. Some of these guides where imported from the UK, others from the US. And most of them are by now long gone.

So it's with a bit of nostalgia that I present to you today the winners of a recent readers' choice survey conducted by PCMag. It's not a dedicated-to-mobile publication like the titles of old, but it's a buyer's guide nonetheless (for whatever that's worth). Here then, are the PCMag Readers' Choice Smartphone and Carrier Awards for 2018:

Winner, Mobile Operating System: Google Android
Available as the platform for nearly every non-Apple phone on the market, Android again earns the Readers' Choice Award, as it's done every year since 2014. Android users are more satisfied than their iOS counterparts with their platform's reliability as well as many other key measures of smartphone use.

Winner, Smartphone: OnePlus
Before you make your next phone purchase, you owe it to yourself to check out OnePlus. The company's phones may not have the most cutting-edge features, but they're solid, affordable phones that, according to our survey respondents, do one thing better than any other phone brand – thrill their customers.

Winners, Mobile Carriers: Consumer Cellular
This year marks the fifth straight year that Consumer Cellular has won the Readers' Choice Award. While the company targets its advertising towards seniors, anyone can take advantage of Consumer Cellular's competitively priced service.

Winners, Mobile Carriers: Google Project Fi
Project Fi's unique approach of taking advantage of multiple carriers' networks continues to resonate with its customers, allowing it to deliver excellent coverage and speed at competitive prices. If you enjoy using Android phones, you should definitely give Project Fi a close look.

For more information, including the most popular devices for each American carrier, see the link immediately below.

Source: PCMag

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Yesterday the governments of Canada, Ontario and Québec announced a public-private partnership to accelerate the development of 5G services in this part of the country.

The project is called ENCQOR, an acronym for "Evolution of Networked Services through a Corridor in Québec and Ontario for Research and Innovation", and will see an investment of $200 million CAD in public funds, matched by private sector partners CGI, Ciena, Ericsson, IBM and Thales. In return, our government is promising the creation of some 4,000 new jobs, with half of those permanent. Here's their millennial-friendly YouTube pitch:



Read more at the links directly below.

Sources: Mobile Syrup (1) (2)

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This past January saw two potential emergencies; one of them turned out to be a false alarm and the other never came to pass. And how the public was alerted about each one was very different.

The threat of a tsunami to coastal areas of B.C. was real, but as the CBC reported, getting the word out to residents was a challenge, with authorities relying on a "patchwork" of local alert systems. In stark contrast, the missile alert warning pushed to mobile phones of Hawaiian Islands residents a week earlier was both efficient and effective. And also, thankfully, a mistake.

A more efficient and effective alert system will soon be available to Canadians, hopefully without the human error. It's called Alert Ready and is powered by a technology called WPA—not the WiFi encryption standard but Wireless Public Alerting. This type of WPA is not just branding for text messages sent to your phone from a central authority; they are actually push notifications sent to devices in a specific area using cell broadcast distribution. For a device to be compatible it must meet three requirements:

Compatible with 4G LTE networks;
compatible with Wireless Public Alerting (WPA);
connected to an 4G LTE network when the emergency alert is issued.

Bell, Rogers and Telus have all begun notifying customers about the new service, which is expected to start rolling out across their networks starting April 6th. More details at the links directly below.

Sources: Alert Ready, iPhone in Canada, Mobile Syrup

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Phillip Huang, an analyst from Barclays Investment Bank, recently took some meetings with the CEO from Bell. That's actually not Huang in the photo (at least I don't think it is), but it's the closest thing I could find—the image appears alongside his name and phone number on this Telus investor relations page.

Anyway, Huang's thoughts about the carrier racket in Canada are covered in this article on the Financial Post. Mobile Syrup has a post of their own about Huang's meetings, but they don't cite a source. I can only assume that they obtained their own copy of the analyst's actual notes to his clients.

According to Huang, the holiday price war between carriers last December was more costly than anticipated, due to high churn and what he calls "a repricing of the base". He goes on to write that any future growth of Freedom Mobile is“unlikely to impact any of the major markets to warrant such a costly competitive response.”

His advice for Bell—which would also apply to Rogers and Telus—is to "maintain pricing discipline" rather than responding directly to any specific Freedom promotion. TL;DR don't expect another holiday miracle anytime soon.

Source: Mobile Syrup

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OpenSignal has just released a new report on LTE networks around the world. Data was gathered in Q4 of 2017 but was just published this week, using more than 50 billion measurements from some 3.8 million smartphones and tablets in 88 countries. Notably absent is any data from the People's Republic of China. Anyway, you probably want to know which of the included countries has the fastest download speeds, so here are the top ten, plus a few more:

01. Singapore - 44.31 Mbps
02. Netherlands - 42.12
03. Norway - 41.20
04. South Korea - 40.44
05. Hungary - 39.18
06. Belgium - 36.13
07. Australia - 36.08
08. New Zealand - 33.52
09. Bulgaria - 33.34
10. Denmark - 33.09

11. Canada - 32.90 Mbps
34. Japan - 25.39
41. United Kingdom - 23.11
62. USA - 16.31
88. India - 6.07

According to OpenSignal's analysis, global LTE speeds seem to have plateaued. The bigger story is improved LTE availability, so here are those rankings:

01. South Korea - 97.49% availability
02. Japan - 94.70%
03. Norway - 92.16%
04. Hong Kong - 90.34%
05. USA - 90.32%
06. Netherlands - 89.64%
07. Hungary - 89.26%
08. Kuwait - 88.40%
09. Lithuania - 88.40%
10. Czech Republic - 87.37%

13. Australia - 86.48% availability
14. India - 86.26%
19. Singapore - 84.43%
26. Canada - 82.38%
36. United Kingdom - 77.28%

You can read the full report at the first link directly below. And if you want your device added to the test pool for the next report, be sure to download the OpenSignal app for either Android or iOS.

Source: OpenSignal via XDA

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Last week a Red Flag Deals user obtained this flyer at the Freedom Mobile outlet in the Aberdeen Centre, a Chinese shopping mall in Richmond, BC. The store was offering a lifetime discount of 25% on all plans priced at $40/month or more. For example, a user on the Big Gig + Everywhere Canada 60 plan could save $15/month, forever.

Apparently this store (and possibly others) hands out codes with new activations; the user can have their unique code applied to their account by calling customer service. The availability of these codes, and whether or not stores are willing to give them out to existing customers, isn't 100% clear in the fourteen pages of replies to the OP. Some RFDers have reported success mentioning an ad on Fairchild Radio, but many more are reporting that their local store has no idea that the promotion even exists.

At this point it might be too late, but if you were going to activate a line on FM anyway, it couldn't hurt to ask. Let us know what they say...!

Sources: iPhone in Canada, Mobile Syrup via Red Flag Deals

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Probably the worst news this week for mobile users in Canada comes from Public Mobile. iPhone in Canada is confirming what subscribers here already know—the once-upstart carrier (now owned by Telus) is raising the rate of its most popular deal. Here is the text of the offer that PM subscribers are receiving by SMS:

Hang on, though... aren't plans like this generally grandfathered? Didn't PM once say that rates on this plan were locked in? You bet they did. Here's the proof, and here's the relevant text:

Surprise!

Customers calling out the carrier on social media are being directed to the terms of service document, which grants Public Mobile the right to change anything at any time. So much for empty promises, but why the sudden and arbitrary push to move customers from one Telus-owned carrier to another? Data overages is the likely answer; Public Mobile doesn't have them by design, but Koodo certainly does.

Source: iPhone in Canada

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Yesterday OpenSignal released a new State of Mobile Networks Report: Canada, for the testing period from October 1st to December 30th, 2017. Telus is the big winner overall, with the best scores in three of OpenSignal's six categories, and tying the other Big Three carriers in the remaining three.

Telus users are welcome to gloat in this thread. What I'd like to draw your attention to are some regional results, where you'll find the only mention of this country's upstart operators:

In my own informal testing using my dual-SIM phone I've come to the same conclusion. There are, of course, some caveats with Freedom's service (like the outage earlier this week), but I don't think FM could have bested Rogers in anything a year or two ago; I say we take whatever small victories we can get!

Source: OpenSignal

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The CBC reported yesterday that Bell has officially expanded its phone unlocking policy to include devices not currently associated with an active account—in other words, second-hand phones intended for use on another network.

A CRTC mandate had ordered all carriers in Canada to drop unlocking fees as of December 1st, 2017; Bell apparently decided that this ruling didn't apply to non-customer hardware, which non-customers only found out when they tried to get their used phones unlocked:

A representative from Bell told the CBC that the carrier has implemented a system of further checks to ensure that any non-customer device was not stolen or linked to a delinquent account. This was their previous justification for refusing to unlock their phones for other networks.

Source: CBC

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Scumbag Samsung is at it again...

If you're financing your ultra-premium Samsung flagship through your carrier, as most folks in North America do, it's entirely understandable that you'd want to de-bloat your phone—see this post from 2013 for some examples of Canadian carrier bloat on a Galaxy S4. One of the easier ways to do this has been to flash a different firmware onto your device; though Samsung phones are region-locked it's been possible to flash an in-region but non-carrier version of your device's firmware using tools and guides from XDA.

Until now, that is: XDA reported yesterday that the January security update for the S8, S8+ and Note8 also includes a new bootloader, one that prevents the flashing of unlocked firmware on carrier-branded phones. If you try to change the firmware on your carrier-branded device you will hard-brick that device. Unlocked hardware purchased from Samsung or third parties seems unaffected.

Though not explicitly stated by anyone on XDA or the cross-post to r/Android, it sounds to me like this "update" would also prevent users from flashing custom ROMs onto late model carrier-branded Samsungs.

Remember that time when Samsung gave free phones to the CyanogenMod team? Those days are clearly gone.

Source: XDA via r/Android

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OpenSignal has just published their bi-annual State of Mobile Networks Report for the USA. T-Mobile seems to have done pretty well, ranking first in five out of six metrics nationwide:

4G download speed - T-Mobile
3G download speed - T-Mobile
Overall download speed - T-Mobile
4G latency - AT&T
3G latency - T-Mobile
4G availability - T-Mobile

AT&T took the crown for best average 4G latency at 58.3 ms—which actually sounds pretty terrible until you take into consideration the huge reporting area. Some more details on OpenSignal's testing:

Reporting period: October 1st to December 30th, 2017
Devices included in test: 237,213
Total measurements: 5,928,296,946

To find the best-performing carrier for your area you can see a list of 33 regional results at the first link directly below. And remember, any suspicions of these findings can be addressed by downloading the app for Android or iOS and joining the pool of test devices for the next report!

Source: OpenSignal via Android Police

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Researchers at Northeastern University have developed an app that can tell you which services are being throttled by your wireless carrier, and by how much. It's called Wehe, and it's only available for Android. Find out why below.

How it works is fairly ingenious. Using YouTube as an example, Wehe spoofs that app for a random download, then repeats the download but with different metadata, fooling your carrier into thinking it's from another source. By comparing speeds you can determine if and by how much your YouTube videos are being throttled. In the case of BingeOn it's been shown that T-Mobile indiscriminately throttles all video to 1.5 Mbps, and with YouTube specifically limits video resolution to 360p.

Wehe is currently able to test the following services via their apps:

Amazon
NBC Sports
Netflix
Skype
Spotify
Vimeo
YouTube

And what about iOS? Well, according to Motherboard Apple won't approve it. An App Store reviewer told the developers that Wehe "has no direct benefits to the user". Because carriers, I guess...

Hopefully Wehe will find its way to APKMirror and/or F-Droid should Google ever come to a similar determination; in the meantime you can grab it on Google Play at the first link directly below.

Links: Google Play, Motherboard, Wehe

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As you can probably guess, there's a more accurate means to determine your strength of your phone's cellular radio than that icon in your status bar. On Android you can find numerical values, measured in dBM and asu as in the grabbed screen above, by navigating through your phone as follows:

Settings > About phone > Status > SIM status

While you could make the argument that Google is already doing a pretty good job of hiding this information from the user, a curious new commit to Android P discovered by XDA would suggest that it could be removed altogether. The reason for doing so can be found in a comment on the commit:

Ok Google, you suck.

The good news is that the relevant APIs are unaffected—meaning that third-party Android apps like LTE Discovery and Signal Strength can still retrieve this data for the user.

At best, carriers might simply wish for their Android offerings to be less geeky and intimidating for new users; at worse they don't want any attention drawn to their sub-par networks. For me, it's yet another reason to steer well clear of carrier-branded hardware.

Source: XDA via Android Police

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I'll never forget this one telephone exchange I had with Rogers. It was the mid-2000s and I was calling to cancel my cable package; after several minutes on hold with retentions, a rep came on the line to make me a final offer:

"Listen, you've been a loyal customer for over a decade, and you've never made a late payment. What would you say if I told you I could knock a full third off of your cable bill?"

My reflexive response: "I'd say you've been overcharging me for ten years."

In the aftermath of this week's 10GB bonanza, Canadian wireless subscribers might rightfully be asking themselves: Why are plans that regularly go for $125/month or more suddenly only $60?

We all know it's the one-two punch of Freedom Mobile and the CRTC mandate for unlocked phones; The Globe and Mail's telecom reporter, Christine Dobby, asked each of the incumbents for their take. The bad news is that her article is locked behind a paywall; the good news is that some thoughtful person on reddit copied and pasted the text of that article for everyone to enjoy. Here then, is how The Big Three justified the events of the past week:

I was sure that I'd read somewhere about someone from Telus saying that they were responding to a regional offer by a competitor, which is actually closer to the truth than anything above. Unfortunately I can't find a citation for that. But the important thing is that Canada has a new benchmark for smartphone plans and what they should cost. To borrow a slogan from WIND Mobile, that's a holiday miracle!

Source: Globe and Mail via r/canada

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Here's hoping that every Canadian reading this was able to jump onto a 10GB/month plan yesterday; if not, I've been hearing that some carriers are extending their promos until end of day today. I actually joined in on the fun myself, and am now the proud owner of two Rogers SIMs—one each for the girlfriend and I.

Why, as a Freedom Mobile customer, would I even want to admit this? Because the Rogers SIMs are going to be used only as backups in the second SIM slots of our two OnePlus phones; our primary voice, text and data service will be with Freedom Mobile. I'll be sealing the deal by porting out our numbers from Koodo later today.

Some Howard Forums members seem to have a hard time believing this, but Freedom's service in downtown Toronto has, in more than a month's worth of use, been surprisingly good. I can think of only two places where I've not had a reliable signal—in the basement of The Bay's Queen Street store and a lawyer's office where there weren't any nearby windows.

For scenarios like these getting back online will be as simple as switching our data connection to Rogers. Those lines were activated on the same $5/month tablet flex plan; they're ready if we need them, but the cost of keeping them on standby is low. In fact, for the next twenty months they're basically free, since Freedom is giving each of our lines a $10 credit per month.

Back in the summer of 2014 when FM was still WIND Mobile I wrote that I wouldn't fault anyone for voting with their wallet—that is, paying for service with an upstart carrier to divert money that would otherwise go to The Big Three. Today, with a dual-SIM phone you can finally have the best of both worlds. And if that dual-SIM device is a OnePlus 5 or 5T you get a pretty fantastic Android smartphone as well!

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Oh, it's a gold rush, all right... in this country, a 10GB data bucket has never been so cheap!

In the absence of any other data, here's a poll that iPhone in Canada ran over the weekend, asking its community which carrier, if any, was chosen for a new 10GB $60/month plan. Here are the results, as of 7:30am Eastern Time this morning:

Koodo Mobile - 21.98% (826 votes)
Fido - 19.13% (719 votes)
Rogers - 16.05% (603 votes)
Telus - 13.97% (525 votes)
Bell - 11.68% (439 votes)
Freedom Mobile - 6.6% (248 votes)
Virgin Mobile - 5.27% (198 votes)

None—I live outside Alberta, BC or Ontario - 5.32% (200 votes)
Total Votes - 3,758

Not an exhaustive data set, to be sure, but it's something at least. And the most heartening thing for me here is that Freedom Mobile didn't score last. Remember, the only reason why Alberta, BC and Ontario are suddenly seeing big data buckets at reasonable rates is because Freedom is finally selling the iPhone on a halfway decent 4G network...

Source: iPhone in Canada

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Something rather unusual is going on with Canada's Big Three carriers: in select markets they're starting to offer big monthly data buckets at reasonable prices.

iPhone in Canada ran three separate stories on this yesterday. First was the news of a Fido and Rogers promo for Alberta and BC, offering 5GB and Canada-wide calling for $60/month, with an extra 5GB for 24 months. Later in the day there was another scoop about a targeted offer for Rogers and Chatr prepaid customers, 4GB of data for $40/month or 6GB for $60 if they switched to Rogers BYOD postpaid. Finally, there was a report that Bell would be offering a 10GB $60/month plan of its own.

And where is TELUS in all of this? Apparently its flanker brand Koodo will be announcing something similar today. That's especially good news for Big Three subscribers in Ontario, as Koodo's out-of-province plans have historically been fairly easy to get.

The reason for this sudden surge in affordable data plans has got to be the one-two punch of Freedom Mobile's cheap 4G offerings and the fact that they're now an official vendor/subsidizer of Apple's iPhone. Even if you think their network sucks—and my experience with a Band 66-compatible phone in downtown Toronto would suggest that it doesn't—you potentially stand to gain from their affordable data, improved network and available handsets.

If only The Big Three were competitive across the entire country, then we'd really have something to celebrate...

Source: iPhone in Canada (1) (2) (3)

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