Freedom Mobile – Canada’s fourth largest cellco by subscribers – has reported that its 4G LTE network now covers nearly 16 million people, or roughly 43% of the population, whilst it plans to expand coverage to a further 1.3 million Canadians during 2019. Most of the upcoming expansion locations are in western Canada, with Victoria and Red Deer earmarked for launches in the next few weeks. Furthermore, Freedom – a wholly owned subsidiary of Shaw Communications – reported that its ongoing deployment of new 700MHz band spectrum is 25% finished, and its recent expansion of VoLTE services to a wide range of mobile devices has resulted in around 800,000 active VoLTE users on its network (of a total 1.47 million network users).
Freedom added a net 86,000 post-paid mobile subscribers (and 66,000 total net users) in its latest reported fiscal quarter to the end of November 2018 whilst seeing improved churn and ARPU. Its total wireless revenue jumped 60% year-on-year in the quarter to CAD273 million (USD206 million) with underlying mobile service revenue of CAD167 million, up 32% y-o-y.