Wind Mobile blows through town

Yesterday, the newly minted Wind Mobile officially launched in Toronto, bringing with it a bit of a shake up in the Canadian wireless carrier space.  They’ll also be launching in Calgary tomorrow.  A few of the key differences between them and the incumbents:

No contracts – you buy your device outright, and you’re not locked in.  They currently only have 4 devices, but hope to expand that line up soon.

Simple pricing structure – there are only 3 basic calling plans ranging between $15 and $45 dollars.

Unlimited data – $35 gets you ‘unlimited’ data.  The reason it’s in quotes is because there is a 5 GB limit.  However, if you go over that, instead of charging you overage fees, they’ll throttle your speed.  This is far better than the roughly 3 cents per kilobyte that other Canadian carriers have.

It’s also worth pointing out that you can access data without a plan, which costs 10 cents per 25 kilobytes, or about $4/ 1 MB.  To do this with Rogers, for example, the same 1 MB would cost you $30. Dropping the data fees by almost a factor of 10 on a per use basis is pretty impressive.

There are a lot of unanswered questions regarding actual coverage, and their roll-out, as mentioned before, is limited to Toronto and Calgary.  On the bright side, Wind considers everywhere between Oshawa and Hamilton as the Toronto “Home Zone”.

Alex was at the launch event yesterday, and managed to get some additional info (and video) which will appear soon.