Wind Mobile Launch Day – Plans, Prices, Phones

Well today is launch day for Wind Mobile in Canada and they sure made a splash. Here are the highlights:

• All phones sold at cost
• $5 unlimited text add-on
• No contracts/911 fees/start up fees/system access fees as expected
• Same pricing for pre-paid and post-paid plans
• Unlimited wind-to-wind calling
• All plans to have caller-id/missed call alerts/etc

Keep reading for a more in-depth look.

First off, the response to the Wind launch has been incredible. So much so that the Wind online store was knocked off-line for an hour. No matter, here is the basics:

All phones will be sold at cost up front.

Handsets / Devices:

Pretty great prices on those. Sure $450 might be a bit steep for an up-front cost for most people, but you can get a good phone in the Samsung Gravity 2 for just $150. I don’t know about you but my connection fee + taxes + service charge + whatever else ballooned my first bill on my current 3-year contract to well over $150, so really, you can almost consider the $150 phone as being “free”.

Now to the big question: The plans. First off, there’s no such thing as a “fee”. No start up fee, no 911 fee, no system access fee – it looks like this is a +tax operation. That is, the price you see is the price you pay plus tax.

Call Control

Another nicety Wind offers is all of their plans come with caller-id, call waiting, call forwarding, and missed call alerts. No more adding on $2 here, $3 there to get these features.

Voicemail

Voicemail however, is only included on the $45 plan. I’m not too concerned as I almost never check my voicemail anyways. Does anyone really use it much these days? I know whenever I make a call and the person isn’t there, I hang up on the voice mail service and just send a quick text. And of course, when Google Voice finally comes to Canada, that’ll be all the free voicemail you need. To add voicemail on to one of the cheaper plans is a $5 add-on. I think I’ll pass.

Unlimited Texting

What is also not mentioned on the charts below is the inclusion of a $5 unlimited texting add-on. That’s really not half bad. High-school students can text like mad on a $20/month plan – quite reasonable.

Long Distance

What is meant by “long distance” depends on your plan. With the $15 and $35 voice plans, your local area is your province. With the $45 plan, calling is unlimited Canada-wide.

Now, here is something that doesn’t quite make sense to me. If you go to the long-distance add-on page on Wind’s online site, you can add unlimited Canada-wide calling to the $35 Always Talk plan for $10 (the add-on is not available to the $15 Chat plan). That will bring you up to $45, but you won’t get the unlimited texting or voicemail features that you would have gotten if you just went for the $45 Always Shout plan. It seems that this option is pretty useless and I don’t quite understand why they have done this.

The $10 unlimited US long distance is a nice feature, although if you have a phone capable of skype, you can do better if you also have the data plan anyways.

$5 for preferred rates to a certain country is a great feature for students studying here in Canada. I personally know many students here from abroad and an affordable mobile phone plan was one of the things they all struggled with. The $15/mo plan with unlimited text and a preferred rate back home would be a very attractive option for them.

General Comments

Wind certainly did make a big splash today. The plans are flexible and include a lot. No fees, and phones at cost, all without a contract. The only things going against Wind right now are:

1. Limited phone selection (expected to get better).
2. Calgary and Toronto only (for now… Vancouver, Edmonton, and Ottawa in 2010)
3. Roaming of 25c/min (plans are great for city dwellers but not others)
4. Limited HOME zone coverage
5. Limited data plan options

Really though, it is expected that a new entrant into the market will have some shortcomings. It seems as though Wind has put up a valiant effort to mitigate these shortcomings and with time they should improve. The data plan option is a bit steep however. $35/mo for unlimited service is pretty great, but there’s no option for something smaller. $10 for 1GB of data would be a nice option to have.

Voice:

Data:

$15 for a starter plan? $45 for a full-featured, all-inclusive voice plan with unlimited everything? No extra fees? It almost brings a tear to your eye. I also like the fair usage stipulation. You can go nuts for your first 5 GB and after that they just throttle you down rather than cutting you off. I guess they don’t want people using it as their standard home internet connection to download movies, but want you to be able to use it for everything else.

So what is a HOME Zone?

In short, a HOME zone is an area where Wind has their own towers. Right now these areas consist of Toronto (see below), and Calgary. When you are in a HOME zone, you get the above plans and rates as advertised. When you’re AWAY, you pay more – 25c/min for all calls, 10c/25kB of data – but incoming texts are still free. Your phone will apparently make it very obvious as to whether you’re in a HOME or AWAY zone by displaying HOME or AWAY accordingly.

This definitely limits your mobility due to the roaming charges, but if you’re a city-goer who spends most of their time in the city, it’s not so bad. The HOME zone is small, but constantly increasing which is to be expected of a new company.

One nice feature that Wind has included is capping the length of an AWAY call to 120 minutes and trying to make it as obvious to the customer as to when they are incurring the roaming charges.

Toronto HOME Zone