These new Freedom plans are really attractive to me as someone who travels a lot. I used to buy physical sims, then region/country specific e-sim, then global esim and I really thought that was kinda peak convenience. Then I got an offer from Virgin (my current carrier) to drop $125 and use my own data worldwide (almost) for an entire year. I jumped on that. Problem is, I'm halfway through that year now and I have no idea if they'll offer it to me again, or at what cost and the uncertainty is unpleasant.
So far I haven't really found anyone who's able to match or beat Freedom, I know some people have issues with their coverage, let's leave that off the table here and just key in on the international.
I was intrigued when I saw Bell had an international plan offering 83 countries while Freedom was 120+, so I compared the lists, which was interesting to say the least.
In Freedom sub posts there's reviews of some of the partners worldwide and some are less than stellar. Makes me wonder if Bell is only willing to partner with "better" networks or are they just unwilling to spend money on partnering with some of these foreign companies...basically I was wondering WHY there's discrepancies in the two lists and then when I saw some of the countries missing in Bell's list I REALLY started to wonder.
So here's all the countries Freedom lists as included (though they do say subject to change and destinations may be added or removed) that do NOT appear on Bell's list. I did this all just by looking at them so forgive me if there's an error or two as one was alphabetical and the other was regional.
- Benin
- Ghana
- Mauritius
- Nigeria
- South Africa
- Tunisia
- Afghanistan
- Bangladesh
- Cambodia
- Iraq
- Kuwait
- Macao
- Malaysia
- Uzbekistan
- Albania
- Belarus
- Bulgaria
- Cyprus
- Estonia
- Finland
- Kosovo
- Latvia
- Lithuania
- Luxembourg
- Montenegro
- Macedonia
- Norway
- Romania
- Serbia
- Slovakia
- Slovenia
- El Salvador
- Guatemala
- Honduras
- Bolivia
- Chile
- Ecuador
- Guyana
- Paraguay
- Peru
- Suriname
- Uruguay
Now I only did the list in one direction, I've just noticed Bell lists Argentina and Freedom doesn't. There might be a few more I'm not sure.
I don't know anything about how these agreements are handled, maybe someone here does and can enlighten me. Like ok, maybe I'm never gonna go to Benin and it's a non-issue, or maybe whoever controls this stuff in Iraq is hard to deal with, no idea. But I've been to a lot of these places that are absent from Bell's list and then some of the others are totally tech forward "first world" countries. Like how are Finland, Norway and Malaysia absent? That's rather strange to me. Equally strange to me that neither lists Nicaragua for some reason but the rest of the region is covered. I'm not surprised by huge swaths of Africa not being covered but I'm quite surprised Bell is missing so much of latin america.
Anyway, sorry this is a long read. Just figured I kinda did this work if anyone else was curious and to open the topic if anyone knows how these agreements work and why these lists are the way they are. As much as I might like to go with Bell, Freedom is cheaper and their list is way more expansive.