$15 Limited Canada-wide Talk (100 minutes outgoing, unlimited incoming), Unlimited Text, 250MB "3G speed" Data
$25 Unlimited Canada-wide Talk, Unlimited Text, 1GB "3G speed" Data
Public Mobile offers these two "3G" plans. CRTC-mandated "minimum, basic" plans that every Canadian operator has to offer. At least they dropped the proud little "True North Affordability" badges because of what evolved into hindsight observation of a greedy marketing grab and useless political fiasco.
But we all know "3G" is really just LTE with a 3mbps throttle. It's not even a native capability in the network machinery anymore, it's just a legacy designator from the past decade. I don't think any 3G-compatible LTE-incompatible phones have even been sold in the last 15 years or so, even if some tiny number of people still stubbornly clung onto these ancient phones (and still somehow had good batteries in them), they wouldn't be able to use the internet on ancient incompatible browsers they can't upgrade on their abandoned obsolete operating systems.
Wouldn't it make sense to get rid of this "3G" capacity? Get it off the network. Upgrade those bottom-tier cheapest plans on the bottom-tier cheapest provider to 4G plans?
It wouldn't cost Telus anything. Ohnoes, some small number of subscribers are exploiting Telus by getting a <grrr> free upgrade <grrr> to "4G speed" on their puny paltry 250MB or 1GB of Data. Maybe these evil exploitive people will use all their Data up after twenty minutes of internet and buy Data Add-ons (at $15 per GB) or finally decide that it's time to upgrade to a higher-priced plan with a larger Data provision, and Telus makes money. Or maybe these people won't spend more money because they don't use their Data anyhow, and Telus loses nothing.
It might even put more money in the bank. Telus could proudly advertise itself as having the first fully modernized, state of the art, legacy free network in Canada. This is a selling point for cellular providers in China and Japan and even USA, the nominal leaders in the industry by most measures. It's been a selling point in other technology markets. Get rid of that old junk, stop wasting money on it, or at least pretend that's what you're doing, and you can more easily convince consumers that you're leaping forward without dragging an anchor.
Why am I advocating this? I do have two $15 plans, admittedly, but I honestly don't really care what Data performance they get because I use mobile Data very rarely and sparingly. The reason I say we get rid of "3G" is that I've gotten rather tired of having to explain it repeatedly in these forums, lol, it just causes more confusion which one way or another leads to frustrated customers who think about leaving the brand.
