"And you wanted to be my latex salesman?!"

It all started a couple of weeks ago: my friend the restaurateur needed help getting the email on his iPhone set up again after unlocking it as part of switching wireless carriers.

In the discussion that ensued, he related the tale og how he was constantly going over his monthly wireless data limit with Rogers, his former wireless provider; he’d contacted Eastlink to see whether they would do better, and they offered him a deal that was too attractive to refuse: $40 per month per line with 3GB of data and unlimited Canada-wide calling and texting.

My ears were extra-perked to this kind of talk, for that very morning I’d paid my Virgin Mobile bill and had to fork out a $25 data overage charge for Catherine’s line (she’d been listening to Spotify while in the hospital), and I was, in any case, already paying $55 per line per month for only 1GB of wireless data.

I contacted the salesperson at Eastlink my friend had dealt with, and she confirmed that, as long as I was an incorporated business, I was eligible for the same deal.

After confirming that Catherine’s phone–an older Moto G–and mine–a Nextbit Robin–would operate on Eastlink’s wireless 1,700 MHz network (they have a handy tool for this), I called Virgin Mobile and gave them the opportunity to counter.

They couldn’t: they would increase my data, and lower my bill from $55 per line per month to $51, but they’d remove Canada-wide calling to do so.

So I told Eastlink to go ahead. The salesperson emailed me a service agreement, I signed it and emailed it back, and two days later a Purolator package arrived with two SIM cards.

I spent 30 minutes on the phone with Eastlink’s support department to port our Virgin numbers–more time that I would have liked, but at least I only had to do it once–and we’re now happy customers of Eastlink.

The final result: our monthly wireless bill (assuming no data overages) will go from $111.40 down to $81.76. But Eastlink also gave us a $400 “port-in credit” per line, meaning that we won’t actually have any wireless bill for the next 9 months or so.

Once I was up and running with my new Eastlink SIM last night, I did a speed test, and here was the result:

My Eastlink-enabled wireless phone now has 60% of the throughput that my Eastlink-enabled home Internet does “down,” and 200% of the throughput “up.”

Oh, and this.