Virgin Mobile is going to bring LTE (Long Term Evolution) speeds to their Members. The internal doc we received states that this should be live “just in time for new iPad” (March 16th). Coverage will reach “6 million Canadians in 14 urban centers across Canada” and “peak speeds up to 75 Mbps (expected average speeds of 12 – 25 Mbps)”.
The 14 urban cities are not noted, but Virgin will piggyback off of Bell’s LTE network so you could expect to see Virgin light up LTE in some of these areas: Toronto, Halifax, Hamilton, Kitchener-Waterloo, Cambridge, Guelph, Belleville, Yellowknife, Montréal, Québec City, Ottawa, London, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver.
In addition, Virgin will be offering a LTE microSIM for free when they activate on the Flexi-Data Plan – starts at $5/month for 10MB and increases to $35/month for 5GB. Finally, seems that Virgin is also pushing Mobile TV, the doc highlighted that “Members get the hottest shows and events on the go. For $5 Members get 5 hours of Mobile TV data usage per month directly on their iPad. The best part is, their data is never touched when using Mobile TV!”
So now there are 4 carriers with LTE: Rogers, Bell, TELUS and Virgin. Soon SaskTel and MTS, but it’ll be interesting to see how quickly Rogers and TELUS will bring LTE to Fido and Koodo.
We’ll have more info soon!
(Thanks tipster!)
