Torontonians looking to save some money on their wireless bill should take note that a new carrier will be up and running as of tomorrow morning. Formerly known as DAVE Wireless, Mobilicity is looking to crack the local market provider business with plans that are far more competitive than its closest competition, WIND Mobile. We’ve got all the details about the company — and a little more thanks to our chat with Mobilicity’s Dave Dobbin — so hit the jump for all the deets.
The cheapest plan offered by Mobilicity is $15. It offers unlimited texts to North America and free in-network calling. Moving up to more suitable plans for anyone but text-crazy teens, an unlimited local talk plan is available for $25 per month with a unlimited local texts being another $10. If you want unlimited everything — data included — then you’ll definitely want the $65 plan is what you’ll need. It offers unlimited North American calls and texts calls, unlimited data in addition to voicemail, call forwarding, 3-way calling and call waiting.
Just in case you haven’t clued in, Mobilicity is not pretending to be a national carrier. It has its own AWS 3G towers in the markets it serves, and roaming agreements with a “national GSM provider” in the markets it doesn’t. Yes, if you leave your home service area you’ll have to pay 20¢ per minute for voice calls, 10¢ per text and $5 per megabyte of data, but Mobilicity isn’t phased (we should add at this point that you pre-pay a set amount of your choice prior to roaming in order to prevent “bill shock”). According to Dobbin, “Mobilicity is for people that live, work, and play” in one city. In fact, he even went to far as to say that anyone with a penchant for travel should really stick with either Bell, Rogers or TELUS. But just because your roots are firmly implanted in your home city doens’t mean you can’t connect with people who live elsewhere.
Sure to please much of Toronto’s diverse population, Mobilicity has monthly calling plans for East Asian and South Asia. Both priced at $20, one offers unlimited calls to China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Vietnam, while the other is good for India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. If you have family elsewhere, calls to landlines in countries like England, Italy, Germany and France are 10¢ per minute. We asked how Mobilicity will be able to profit from these plans and why other carriers aren’t doing something similar, but all we were told is that it would be impolite to comment on the affairs of other carriers. Moving on…
Mobilicity will offer a data stick for $99.99 and hook you up to all of the 3G data you can consume for $40 per month. We were curious to see if this plan has a hidden cap or will be throttled past a certain point. Dobbin was up front and said the only thing that is throttled are P2P connections, which, in fact, are completely blocked.
Speaking of hardware sales, Mobilicty’s line-up will include the BlackBerry Bold 9700 ($499.99), HTC Snap ($199.99). Nokia 5230 ($169.99), Sony Ericsson TM506 ($99.99) and more. If you’re not down with that selection, any device you bring to the network can be hooked up so long as it supports AWS 3G.
Mobilcity officially launches tomorrow in Toronto, with service for Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary and Ottawa scheduled to kick off “later this year. Let’s hope it delivers.
