I used Freedom Mobile as my primary SIM card for 10 months, here’s how it went

After testing a Freedom Mobile SIM card last fall, I learned that the carrier could easily work in Toronto and at my parents’ house outside of Ottawa, in a town called Renfrew. Then, on Black Friday (the day I always shop for cell plans), Freedom Mobile had the best deal on a plan with Canadian and US data ($45 for 50GB), so I decided to do a longer-term test throughout 2024.

Ten months later, I really don’t have anything negative to say about my experience. On the contrary, I’m happy that I can easily switch between networks owned by Bell, Telus, Rogers, or Freedom (owned by Videotron) without having to worry about ending up in dead zones in places where all my friends have usable service.

A few years ago, most Freedom plans included 1-5GB of nationwide data in addition to 10-50GB of data for use on Freedom’s home networks. That all changed in 2023 when Videotron bought the carrier and rolled out its current data structure, which includes nationwide coverage by default. At the time of writing, many Freedom plans also include data in Canada and the United States; some even include data for Mexico.

How it happened

For my day-to-day life in Toronto, Freedom has been a viable option for years, and until more recently, it was actually the only carrier that offered service in some of the city’s subway tunnels. Two of my friends have been using Freedom since before the service went national, and they don’t seem to really complain about it. However, my parents living in a small town and the few camping trips I take each year have always kept me from using this once-regional carrier. Now that I’m using it, I really can’t complain about the data speeds in Toronto. It’s always pretty fast, and I’ve never had to wait long for things to download or upload.

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 the Telus network and had usable service in most places in the park. This year, when I went with Freedom, I was still able to use my data, but I have to 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 too upset about having slow internet speeds when I’m camping.

My second camping trip was in the Haliburton area, below Algonquin Park, and again I was able to use my data where we camped. It wasn’t super remote either, but again my data wasn’t super fast compared to others on the trip, but it was still usable.

The only other note I would like to mention is that I have also traveled to the US a few times with this plan, and beyond that I accidentally burned all my data to watch a super crunchy version of Ocean 11which ultimately led to me getting scammed on a recent trip, I found it worked well. If I may spread the word Ocean 11 at 84Mbps roaming as a hotspot, I won’t complain.

The last note I’ll mention is that if you upgrade to Freedom, you need to go into your phone’s cellular settings and enable roaming all the time. This allows Freedom to offer all users much better coverage than before. Since I have both Canadian and US data, I haven’t had to worry about roaming settings when traveling.

Overall, I have no complaints about my experience 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 on switching networks again this Black Friday to test out another network, I’d happily stick with Freedom as long as it continues to offer the best mobile network deals.