Six years ago I switched my mobile phone provider from Eastlink to Public Mobile.
I have been a happy customer ever since.
Public Mobile is a bargain basement “you’re on your own” brand of Telus (one of the big three mobile providers in Canada). The brand uses the same Telus Mobility network as the other Telus brands, it’s just that service and support is entirely online, and primarily self-service (“go look it up in the forum”).
Since I switched in 2018 service has only gotten better and cheaper: I started out paying $40/month for a plan that included unlimited Canada-wide calling and texts, plus 4.5GB of 3G data; I just updated my plan today to one that’s the same price, but now includes 60GB of 5G data:
I switched plans today (oddly, saving $5/month and gaining 10GB of additional data) because I was doing an audit of our household mobile plans, focusing on Lisa, who had been with Bell Mobility for a long time.
I ended up switching Lisa to a Public Mobile plan that’s $34 for 50GB of 5G data, saving her $52 a month over what she was paying Bell. The switching process, which included porting her old mobile number over to Public Mobile, was painless, and done entirely within the Public Mobile iOS app, taking advantage of her iPhone’s eSIM abilities, which meant we didn’t even need to leave the house to switch. The number porting was completed in less than an hour.
–– THIS IS ADVERTISING ––
Here’s an affiliate link that, if you click, and then follow through and create a Public Mobile account, will chop $1 off my own Public Mobile bill, and give you a $10 credit (thank you to the three people who’ve used that affiliate link over the last 5 years: much appreciated).
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I am Peter Rukavina and this is my blog. I am a writer, letterpress printer, and a curious person.
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Comments
Interesting. I'm a low end
Interesting. I'm a low end phone user, also signed up with Public in 2018, and for me it's gotten worse: higher price for same service.
I don't use much data, but I do use it sometimes - for the past couple of months I've been averaging 200-250 MB/month, before that it was often closer to 100 MB.
I signed up for a $10/month plan that had only about 50 minutes and no data, and was going to use their data packs - $15 for 1 GB, at my use, it would last around 5-6 months for final price of $13/month.
Then I got $2 off for signing up for credit card autopay, and $1/month off each year I stayed with them - makes sense, they're amortizing away the customer acquisition cost (never mind that I paid for my own acquisition with the ~$10 SIM charge, but whatever). So by now my monthly price is $6 + tax. But again, that's for ~200 MB per month at 3G speeds.
The deal actually got better at first - early on, they were giving away 1-2 GB data packs and "long-distance" voice minute packs around Christmas, so I haven't had to buy data for a while.
A year or two ago, they raised the price of my plan from $10 to $13. No changes, just a 30% price hike. But OK, at least my promos are still on.
There have been no Christmas promo packs last couple of years, but OK, I can pay for the data packs, they're not expensive when amortized over several months.
I was checking my pack status recently. Data's beginning to run low. Might be time to buy a pack. Except... data packs now expire after 30 days. So the pack I'd be buying is no longer $15 for 1 GB (it would expire before I have a chance to use even half of it), it's now $5 for 200 MB.
At this point my plan is to switch to their current lowest plan, $15/month for 250 MB at 3G speeds, but that's pretty clearly worse than what I had 4 years ago. And it's not like any of their costs have gone up - there's no support, data transfer through the internet isn't getting more expensive, I live in central Toronto where towers have been built a decade ago, I'm clearly lowest priority in any QoS queue (which I'm fine with), acquisition amortization is paying for the $1/year off.
Public (and to a lesser extent Lucky Mobile) used to be the lowest price for basic mobile phone service, but now they're getting pretty close to other carriers. Freedom Mobile's cheapest plan right now $19 and has 1 GB at 4G speeds. That's substantially more than a $10/month or $8/month offer, but not really substantially more than $15/month - especially if Telus ever changes Public's remaining promos.
I knew of eSIMs and used it
I knew of eSIMs and used it recently in Italy, but it never occured to me that it would make it easier to switch providers at home. I'm not sure why I didn't make that connection.
I've been spending way too much $$ with Bell for years and they have been pretty awful about overages etc, but there was enough friction there that I didn't make the move.
Downloading the Public Mobile app now.
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