The IT Nerd

Since my wife and I switched to Freedom Mobile, I’ve got a number of questions in my inbox about how does their network work, and how does it impact upon the type of service that you can expect to see. To me it’s pretty straightforward. But as my wife loves to point out to me, it’s straightforward to me. Meaning that because of what I do, everything tech related is crystal clear to me. But it may not be the same for the average person. Thus I spent a couple of days to document and test Freedom Mobile’s network and the speeds that I experienced. And I did this by going to a variety of places in the Greater Toronto Area to do this testing, which enabled me to experience the full breadth of Freedom Mobile’s network.

Let’s start with the types of networks that Freedom Mobile has. You can expect to see any or all of the following in your travels:

Freedom 5G – This is their 5G network that they own and control. When you’re on this network, you’ll see this on your phone:

Now I did some testing previously and the speeds were decent. However I did take this speed test in uptown Toronto:

The big three carriers, meaning Rogers, Bell, and TELUS do have faster 5G speeds. But there’s nothing that Freedom’s 5G speeds will stop you from doing. And what did surprise me is that I got 5G in places that according to this coverage map shouldn’t have 5G coverage. This suggests to me Freedom Mobile is rolling out 5G as fast as they can as they likely see that as being part of their critical path to success. As a result, their maps aren’t up to date. So if you sign up for Freedom, you may get a surprise in terms of their 5G coverage.

Freedom LTE – This is their 4G LTE network that they own and control. During my testing, I was on the on the 5G network most of the time. But sometimes I would flip to the LTE network briefly which makes sense because I live in the Greater Toronto Area and phone carriers try to spend a lot of time and effort to have the best network quality in urban areas or areas where there are a lot of people. When you’re on their LTE network, you’ll see this on your phone:

Thus to test how fast LTE is, I had to drive to a place that was LTE only. And this is the sort of speed that I got:

While this was on the low side of LTE speed, it’s still a decent speed test result as this sort of speed won’t stop you from watching videos or doing a video call for example.

Nationwide LTE – This is the network that Freedom Mobile fall back to which is controlled by Rogers and Bell. You will switch to this network when you are not within any of Freedom Mobile’s networks. When you’re on this network, this is what you will see on your phone:

Now some concerns that were expressed to me by people who emailed in about what happens when you’re on this network. Specifically Will Rogers or Bell throttle your speeds? Based on my testing, that does not appear to be the case:

This speed is faster than any of the results that I got on Freedom Mobile’s LTE or 5G networks. That says to me that Rogers and Bell aren’t throttling Freedom Mobile customers. It also suggests that Freedom Mobile needs to work on the speeds of their network. Now I say that not because I am trying to “throw shade” as the kids say on Freedom Mobile. I say that because consumers are of the belief due to the advertising that telcos do that they should want the fastest speeds regardless of whether they need that speed or not. I would argue not. But the point I’m making here is that Freedom Mobile is going to get caught up in that even though they’re doing nothing wrong per se. Having said that I will highlight this again, you’re not going to be limited in terms of what you want to do on Freedom Mobile based on the speeds that I see here.

I should also mention that Freedom Mobile also has a 3G network that I saw pop up a couple of times for maybe a minute or two when I was doing my testing. Specifically when I was way outside of Toronto. I’m guessing that Freedom has 3G support to fill in holes in LTE coverage and to provide support for older devices. I didn’t do any speed tests on their 3G network as I don’t think that there are many people on it for the reasons I mentioned previously. Thus there would be no value in doing so.

One final observation is that any time my phone (an iPhone 14 Pro for the record) switched networks, it was seamless, which is the way things should work. I note that because when I’ve tested this sort of thing with any of the big three carriers, I would have the odd occasion where I would lose data service when the network switched. At that point I would have to toss myself into airplane mode for a minute and back to get my data service back. Now maybe I was lucky over the two days that I was doing this testing. I don’t know. But I thought I would mention it.

Hopefully this gives you a better understanding of how Freedom Mobile’s network works. If you’re thinking of getting Freedom Mobile, I would check their coverage map and see if their coverage fits your needs. For a lot of Canadians, I suspect that it might. And if you have any questions about Freedom Mobile, please leave a comment or email me as others have and I will try and answer your question.

This entry was posted on January 2, 2024 at 8:50 am and is filed under Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.