This is PM community forum. Naturally, you will find excited, happy PM customers responding to your post with positives about PM. It would be great if PM actually does match/beat the Freedom plan that you mentioned. However, the people above are basically saying that its unlikely because PM is not feeling threatened by Freedom mobile.. not yet anyways.
I will highlight some of the negatives about Wind/Freedom that I know of firsthand in hopes of encouraging you to make that move to PM. If these don't apply to you then you can happily stay with Wind.
Wind = Freedom is far from good when it comes to network coverage. I am in Toronto and my nephew's Wind phone line was so useless that I got fed up one day and simply activated a new PM line and just handed him the PM sim card. The phone would be sitting right in front of us and showing full signal strength, yet it wouldn't ring when called. Simply a who called sms notification would appear a few minutes later.
In downtown Toronto, a large area between Bay sreet, University avenue, Wellington street and Queen street is a dead zone for Wind/Freedom. Network connection randomly shifts between roaming and home.
There are at least a dozen such zones within Wind's home zone in the GTA where the phone would go into roaming mode and cost you if you didn't notice. No matter how cheap the roaming charges are, its still not cool to be roaming within the middle of home zones and paying extra.
Wind also has terrible coverage in large areas within the university campuses, hospitals, inside buildings where you are more than 10 feet away from the nearest window. Service also fades despite full signal stregth at major malls on busy days or in areas where a lot of people are gathered, i.e. public events, sports arenas.
Connection is non-existent in underground garages. PM gets a 1 or 2 bars of 3G signal in underground garages in most areas I visit and that is good enough to make/receive calls and remain connected to the data network, albeit at a much slower speed.
PM's data and global text are nationwide. You can easily work around the provincial calling by installing a free caller app such as Fongo or Google Hangout Dialer. PM's rewards also sweeten the deal by reducing your bill for a minimal effort. Ask if you have more questions about these things.
@imm1304 What you wrote was well written, thank you for that.
I would have to add that PM's coverage and LTE speed during peek hours are great. No lag or slow downs. My friend back in the summer played Pokemon Go and Wind=Freedom would not even allow him to play the game (the data was so bad and spotty). I had to him piggy back my PM data to play the game together lol. @NDesai
On another note, he switched to PM and now his coverage is great. He has no dropped calls and reception is great! He is very happy with switching to PM now.
Thats awesome @Raven_Jet, your friend is happy and you get a referral. Win win situation.
Freedom (even Chatr) customers don't know what they are missing until they switch to a real nationwide LTE carrier. Thanks to PM we don't have to sacrifice network quality to save money.
@MrAureliusR I am afraid I need to call shill on this post as well. There are more than enough documented issues with Wind's network (I live in Toronto area as well so can not fathom how you have no issues)
As well if you go read the other board, you can see the lineup of Wind supporters many of them who have been with service since year 1 jumping ship to Public and other brands
As for plans you left out the very serious problem that Wind has no LTE footprint at all plus the fact you are REQUIRED to purchase a special phone just to even try and use LTE. Public works with any phone.
When you subsidize a $999 phone over your 2 year contract there is a huge difference in service.
Wind / Freedom -
Upfront Cost of LG V20 $300
+$15 Monthly TAB Boost
So a $40 Plan on Wind ($25 Plan + $15 TAB Boost) Looks like:
Unlimited Talk + Text
Call Display & Voice Mail
No Data
You really think that is even close to the Public $38 plan???
@Raven_Jet & @imm1304 & @NDesai just so you guys realize about the hardware / no LTE issue. For now there is no hardware in the world that uses Band 66 hence it is worthless. Maybe OP can try again in a year or two once T-Mobile launches but for now nadda
While waiting for my lunch order, I typed the long response and the OP ran off without reading it.
@kav2001c, the band 66 is a huge deal breaker. I wouldn't like it at all if they forced me to buy a $1000 phone to access LTE. And then I find out that the LTE zone is within the old city of Toronto only.. not even the suburbs. At least 70% of the GTA population wouldn't be able to connect to their Toronto "traffic-free" LTE zone. Which reminds me, traffic free is cheap gimmicky slogan.. deliberately misleading target audience to think that other networks are somehow congested and slow.
