Freedom Mobile and Choice of Phones

Freedom Mobile in Canada has a very useful plan for $15 per month. It is called Home 250. It includes 100 minutes outgoing call air time, unlimited incoming, unlimited short messages and 256M full speed (30Mbps) data. After using 256M full speed data, there are no overage charge, the speed is just throttled down to 256Kbps, which is good enough for voice calls over Internet, such as Hangout Dialer calls, not to mention all messaging such as WhatsApp and Wechat. So essentially, the $15 covers most of people's smart phone plan requires except video watching, which will use up bigger data plan pretty fast too.

Having found and tested this plan, the next step is finding a right phone. The choice is limited if you want to find a cheap and good one by yourself due to requirement of cellular network. Unlike big carriers like Rogers and Bell, Freedom Mobile's network requirement is rather special.

Check this out:
https://www.reddit.com/r/freedommobile/comments/8ao4tu/a_guide_to_freedom_mobiles_network/

So we need:

1. Must support UMTS1700/2100 (Band 4). This band is used for voice calls. Without both 1700 and 2100 in Band 4, even the phone has Internet network, calls will fail. It will dial but the receiving end will never ring. Data works on this band if all other bands are not available. Please note there is the misconception that some phone lists UMTS2100 and claim to work with Freedom Mobile. It won't. UMTS1700 is more important than UMTS2100.
2. Should support LTE1700/2100 (Band 4). This band is used for high speed data network for better data connection.
3. Better support  LTE1700/2100 (Band 66). This band is the new high speed band for data network. It has much more space to avoid congestion. Not many phones support this band.
4. Nice to support  LTE700 (Band 13), LTE2600 (Band 7) and LTE2600 (Band 41). Freedom Mobile is using these bands in congested area like shopping malls.

From Freedom Mobile Website in January 2024:

Our LTE network primarily supports Band 66, Band 13, Band 4, Band 71 and Band 7 in select locations. Band 66 provides access to our fastest LTE speeds, while Band 13 is our Extended Range LTE that may be able to reach farther and penetrate walls for better coverage in buildings, basements, and elevators.

I found phonedb.net has most accurate and readable specification data on phones. GSMArena.com is confusing or occasionally not correct.

There are a few good choice of phones supporting Freedom Mobile currently available. They all support UMTS Band 4, LTE Band 4 and LTE Band 66:

• OnePlus5/5T
• Sony Xperia XA2
• Essential Phone PH-1
• Xiaomi Mi A2
• LG G6 H873