Here’s some inside info on how things work on this blog. My wife works with me to run this blog as I often am too busy working with my clients to get content online. So she will sometimes post stories for me. Especially if it’s breaking news. She also monitors the Twitter and Mastodon accounts and sometimes she will post stuff on those platforms as well. Recently, she had a conversation with some of her friends about how much their telco costs were, and the fact that getting a better deal from whomever your telco happens to be at that moment is next to impossible. That prompted her to post this on Twitter:
Serious question.
Why is it that Canadian telcos like @Bell , @Rogers, and @Telus value your business and give you great deals AFTER you leave them rather than while you're still with them?
So my wife took this conversation to her DM’s, and after some back and forth she got what she thought what was a commitment to get a call back from the TELUS loyalty group within three business days. The thing was that three business days passed and nothing happened. Thus she posted this:
Several days ago, @Telus said that someone would be phoning me to "go over options" to see if we can lower our bill. But that hasn't happened. That's very disappointing and I'm having my partner look at another carrier to save money. https://t.co/HNzA2cJPs6
TELUS to their credit, did try to call her twice after that was posted. Once she was in a meeting so she wasn’t able to take the call. The second time she picked up the phone but there was nobody on the other end. What made matters worse is that when she checked her voice mail, she found out that their loyalty department is outbound only as that information was in the voice mails that they left. Meaning that you can’t call them back. While I get why they do that, which is to avoid being flooded by people who want to lower their cell phone bills, it’s a #Fail as it creates this sort of situation where a customer who does want to work with a telco being unable to get in touch with said telco. Thus the customer left frustrated and starts seeking other options as a result. And that’s when she highlighted to me what our cell phone bill was with TELUS:
Each of our iPhones cost us $70 a month and that gave us 6GB of data.
Each iPhone has Visual Voicemail which costs $5 a month.
Each of our Apple Watches were $10 a month with a bonus of 1GB of data.
So the net result was $85 a month for each our phones with TELUS. That isn’t cheap, and we don’t get a lot for our money seeing as we were only getting 6 – 7 GB of data. That started a discussion between us as to where we could save money. Because let’s be honest. Everything is more expensive these days. Which means that people are going to look to save money wherever they can. And if Canadian telcos were smart, they would work to help their customers to save money rather than have them bolt to another carrier and then have to try to get them back later. Now I get why telcos do this. Their shareholders only care about churn (the number of people who leave a telco which should be less than 1% per quarter), average revenue per user, and the number of customers a telco acquires in a given quarter. The retention of customers isn’t top of mind with telcos unless their churn rate skyrockets. But I would argue this. The best customer for a telco to have is the one they currently have because they already have them. And if it costs them a couple of bucks via a better deal to keep them, then that is a better option in my mind versus having them leave and either offer a “winback” deal to get that customer back, or acquiring a new customer from another telco via a promotional offer of some sort to entice them to switch.
Now all of this sounds like we’re trashing TELUS. The fact is that we’ve had no problems with them to speak of in terms of service. As in being able use our iPhones and Apple Watches when we need to and where we need to. And the very few times we’ve called them, the customer service has been great. But the fact is that my wife and I simply need to pay less for our cell phone service. And clearly there are better deals out there to be had.
Enter Freedom Mobile.
Now we were willing to give Freedom Mobile a shot because there was zero chance we were going back to Rogers due to their massive outage that basically took down the country in 2022. And we were never going to bundle all of our services with Bell because we want diversity with our telco services. In other words, some of our services with one telco, and other services with another telco. That way if a Rogers type situation happens again, something should still work. Thus Freedom Mobile got a serious look from us. And they had a deal during boxing week that got our attention. Which was this:
30GB of data in Canada and US for $34 a month for 2 years.
$10 for our Apple Watches
$4 for visual voice mail
That’s $48 a month for each of our phones and Apple Watches. A net savings of $41 a month for each of us. And we get more for the money we do spend with Freedom Mobile in terms of far more data. After doing some research in terms of coverage and service quality on Reddit, we felt comfortable enough to pull the trigger on this. Yes we’d likely have to revisit this in two years, but that’s not a today problem. Saving money is today’s problem.
PRO TIP: If you’re going to pull the trigger on Freedom Mobile, your best bet is to go to a corporate location to get the best service based on the research that I did on Reddit. Now I will say that this isn’t 100% guaranteed as I will illustrate in a moment. But it’s truly your best bet as the consensus on Reddit is that dealership stores which may display Freedom Mobile signage aren’t owned by Freedom Mobile. Thus they apparently have been known to play fast and loose with the truth to make a sale.
Type in your location. Then on the left side, where the location results are, choose “warranty and repair”. That will isolate all the corporate stores as evidenced by this screenshot:
Now originally my wife and I went to the Sherway Gardens location as we had to do some other things in that mall. Thus it was one stop shopping. But when we started talking to the staff there, they said that Apple Watch plans are not something that Freedom Mobile offers and the only company that does is “TELUS and maybe Bell”. Even when I showed them Freedom Mobile’s website on my phone which clearly lists Apple Watch plans as an option, they denied it was even a thing. Thus we left and went to the Cloverdale Mall location. Which is where I posted this to Twitter:
Hey @FreedomMobile some free advice. The staff at yes Sherway Gardens location claims that you don’t offer Apple Watch plans. I know that’s not true and if we weren’t determined to leave @telus we would have pulled the plug. Instead we went to another location and it worked out.
Anyway, when we worked with the staff at the Freedom Mobile kiosk at Cloverdale Mall, they really worked with us to make sure that we understood everything before we did anything. And within 20 minutes, we had an account set up as well as two SIM cards. We went home and less than one hour after we got home our numbers were ported over from TELUS as we were notified of that via a text message that we got shortly after we inserted our Freedom Mobile SIM cards into our respective phones. At that point we were able to create an online account where we were able to add visual voice mail. Then we were able to use the Watch app on our iPhones to add a Freedom Mobile plan to our Apple Watches. Finally, we enabled WiFi calling on our phones to give more robust options in terms of cell coverage when we are on WiFi in an area with limited cell coverage.
Total time invested including driving from home to Sherway Gardens, then to Cloverdale Mall, then to home to finish setting up everything: Just under 2 hours
Other than the staff at the Freedom Mobile kiosk at Sherway Gardens who clearly didn’t have a clue about Freedom Mobile’s offerings, the process was pain free. One bonus is that Freedom Mobile waived our connection fees. That’s an extra $90 that we’re saving.
Now I really have to do some testing on Freedom Mobile’s coverage. But the thing that I noticed right off the top was that we were getting a strong 5G signal inside our condo. This was never the case with TELUS. I’ll be interested to see how that translates into coverage and speed in the areas that I travel. Thus I’ll spend the next few days doing some testing this with my iPhone 14 Pro and let you know what I find out. I’ll also report back on any issues that we have as I’m typing this less than 24 hours after we made the switch. While we’ve had no issues so far, it is possible that we might come across something negative (or positive for that matter) that is worth reporting on. Stay tuned for that as well. And if you have any questions on our experience, drop us a comment and we’ll do our best to answer them.
Switching Our iPhones And Apple Watches From TELUS To Freedom Mobile Was Mostly Painless
Posted in Commentary with tags Freedom Mobile, Telus on December 28, 2023 by itnerdHere’s some inside info on how things work on this blog. My wife works with me to run this blog as I often am too busy working with my clients to get content online. So she will sometimes post stories for me. Especially if it’s breaking news. She also monitors the Twitter and Mastodon accounts and sometimes she will post stuff on those platforms as well. Recently, she had a conversation with some of her friends about how much their telco costs were, and the fact that getting a better deal from whomever your telco happens to be at that moment is next to impossible. That prompted her to post this on Twitter:
She got this response from TELUS who at the time was our choice of carrier for our iPhones and Apple Watches very quickly:
So my wife took this conversation to her DM’s, and after some back and forth she got what she thought what was a commitment to get a call back from the TELUS loyalty group within three business days. The thing was that three business days passed and nothing happened. Thus she posted this:
TELUS to their credit, did try to call her twice after that was posted. Once she was in a meeting so she wasn’t able to take the call. The second time she picked up the phone but there was nobody on the other end. What made matters worse is that when she checked her voice mail, she found out that their loyalty department is outbound only as that information was in the voice mails that they left. Meaning that you can’t call them back. While I get why they do that, which is to avoid being flooded by people who want to lower their cell phone bills, it’s a #Fail as it creates this sort of situation where a customer who does want to work with a telco being unable to get in touch with said telco. Thus the customer left frustrated and starts seeking other options as a result. And that’s when she highlighted to me what our cell phone bill was with TELUS:
So the net result was $85 a month for each our phones with TELUS. That isn’t cheap, and we don’t get a lot for our money seeing as we were only getting 6 – 7 GB of data. That started a discussion between us as to where we could save money. Because let’s be honest. Everything is more expensive these days. Which means that people are going to look to save money wherever they can. And if Canadian telcos were smart, they would work to help their customers to save money rather than have them bolt to another carrier and then have to try to get them back later. Now I get why telcos do this. Their shareholders only care about churn (the number of people who leave a telco which should be less than 1% per quarter), average revenue per user, and the number of customers a telco acquires in a given quarter. The retention of customers isn’t top of mind with telcos unless their churn rate skyrockets. But I would argue this. The best customer for a telco to have is the one they currently have because they already have them. And if it costs them a couple of bucks via a better deal to keep them, then that is a better option in my mind versus having them leave and either offer a “winback” deal to get that customer back, or acquiring a new customer from another telco via a promotional offer of some sort to entice them to switch.
Now all of this sounds like we’re trashing TELUS. The fact is that we’ve had no problems with them to speak of in terms of service. As in being able use our iPhones and Apple Watches when we need to and where we need to. And the very few times we’ve called them, the customer service has been great. But the fact is that my wife and I simply need to pay less for our cell phone service. And clearly there are better deals out there to be had.
Enter Freedom Mobile.
Now we were willing to give Freedom Mobile a shot because there was zero chance we were going back to Rogers due to their massive outage that basically took down the country in 2022. And we were never going to bundle all of our services with Bell because we want diversity with our telco services. In other words, some of our services with one telco, and other services with another telco. That way if a Rogers type situation happens again, something should still work. Thus Freedom Mobile got a serious look from us. And they had a deal during boxing week that got our attention. Which was this:
That’s $48 a month for each of our phones and Apple Watches. A net savings of $41 a month for each of us. And we get more for the money we do spend with Freedom Mobile in terms of far more data. After doing some research in terms of coverage and service quality on Reddit, we felt comfortable enough to pull the trigger on this. Yes we’d likely have to revisit this in two years, but that’s not a today problem. Saving money is today’s problem.
PRO TIP: If you’re going to pull the trigger on Freedom Mobile, your best bet is to go to a corporate location to get the best service based on the research that I did on Reddit. Now I will say that this isn’t 100% guaranteed as I will illustrate in a moment. But it’s truly your best bet as the consensus on Reddit is that dealership stores which may display Freedom Mobile signage aren’t owned by Freedom Mobile. Thus they apparently have been known to play fast and loose with the truth to make a sale.
To find a corporate store, go to this link:
https://locations.freedommobile.ca/results
Type in your location. Then on the left side, where the location results are, choose “warranty and repair”. That will isolate all the corporate stores as evidenced by this screenshot:
Now originally my wife and I went to the Sherway Gardens location as we had to do some other things in that mall. Thus it was one stop shopping. But when we started talking to the staff there, they said that Apple Watch plans are not something that Freedom Mobile offers and the only company that does is “TELUS and maybe Bell”. Even when I showed them Freedom Mobile’s website on my phone which clearly lists Apple Watch plans as an option, they denied it was even a thing. Thus we left and went to the Cloverdale Mall location. Which is where I posted this to Twitter:
Anyway, when we worked with the staff at the Freedom Mobile kiosk at Cloverdale Mall, they really worked with us to make sure that we understood everything before we did anything. And within 20 minutes, we had an account set up as well as two SIM cards. We went home and less than one hour after we got home our numbers were ported over from TELUS as we were notified of that via a text message that we got shortly after we inserted our Freedom Mobile SIM cards into our respective phones. At that point we were able to create an online account where we were able to add visual voice mail. Then we were able to use the Watch app on our iPhones to add a Freedom Mobile plan to our Apple Watches. Finally, we enabled WiFi calling on our phones to give more robust options in terms of cell coverage when we are on WiFi in an area with limited cell coverage.
Total time invested including driving from home to Sherway Gardens, then to Cloverdale Mall, then to home to finish setting up everything: Just under 2 hours
Other than the staff at the Freedom Mobile kiosk at Sherway Gardens who clearly didn’t have a clue about Freedom Mobile’s offerings, the process was pain free. One bonus is that Freedom Mobile waived our connection fees. That’s an extra $90 that we’re saving.
Now I really have to do some testing on Freedom Mobile’s coverage. But the thing that I noticed right off the top was that we were getting a strong 5G signal inside our condo. This was never the case with TELUS. I’ll be interested to see how that translates into coverage and speed in the areas that I travel. Thus I’ll spend the next few days doing some testing this with my iPhone 14 Pro and let you know what I find out. I’ll also report back on any issues that we have as I’m typing this less than 24 hours after we made the switch. While we’ve had no issues so far, it is possible that we might come across something negative (or positive for that matter) that is worth reporting on. Stay tuned for that as well. And if you have any questions on our experience, drop us a comment and we’ll do our best to answer them.
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