Vidéotron Mobile
 | |
| Subsidiary | |
| Industry | Telecommunications |
| Founded | 1964 |
| Headquarters | Montreal, Quebec, Canada |
Key people | Manon Brouillette (President and CEO) |
| Services | mobile telephony, SMS, MMS, mobile broadband, LTE |
Number of employees | 4,000 |
| Parent | Vidéotron |
| Website | videotron.com/service/mobile/ |
Vidéotron Mobile (formerly known as Vidéotron Wireless) is a Canadian mobile phone provider, owned by the telecommunications company Vidéotron, that provides wireless service to customers in Quebec and the National Capital Region.
Network
The Vidéotron Mobile network uses the Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) spectrum. Its network provides download speeds of up to 140 Mbit/s in most Quebec cities using LTE.
In the 3G band, customers connect to the Vidéotron Mobile network on the 1700 MHz frequency. For LTE (4G), Vidéotron Mobile shares its network with Rogers Wireless.
Products
Feature phones, smartphones, and mobile broadband modems and antennas are products offered by Vidéotron Mobile. Smartphones include various BlackBerry OS- and Android-powered devices, Apple iPhones, as well as a few running Symbian and another running Windows Phone.
Services
Voice plans
On March 20, 2013, Vidéotron Mobile introduced a half dozen of new voice plans, all which include unlimited Quebec-wide calls received from and made to Vidéotron landline and mobile customers. Four different plan types are offered:
- The Texts + 50 min plan, the lowest-priced plan, with 50 non-Vidéotron anytime local minutes and unlimited sent and received messages
- Basic plans
- Plus plans with unlimited calling, Canada-wide roaming and ½ to 1 GB mobile Internet
- Premium plans, identical to Plus but offering 2 to 6 GB mobile Internet
Messaging
Short Message Service (SMS) and Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) are currently available to Vidéotron customers.
Vidéotron also offered a V-Mail app to almost all of its older mobile phone customers, which allowed the sending and receiving of email messages for the same price as an SMS message. The only smartphones that cannot use the V-Mail app include the HTC Amaze 4G, the Nokia E73 and all BlackBerry smartphones, the latter which require a special BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) plan and app for email. V-Mail service was later discontinued: "As of February 24, 2012, Vidéotron's V-mail application is no longer downloadable."
Illico Mobile
Also offered is a television service, illico mobile, which offers 47 live TV channels and 45 Galaxie premium radio stations. One must purchase a block of hours to watch TV or listen to premium radio from their smartphone. Pay-per-view programming is also available, and does not require the illico mobile TV service, but charges a fee for each program accessed instead.
Roaming
When a customer is outside of Vidéotron's coverage, services are provided by their roaming partners. For example, Rogers Wireless is the roaming partner in Canada while both AT&T Mobility and T-Mobile USA are roaming partners in the United States. Usage while roaming outside of Québec and a small part of Ontario is charged at pay-per-use rates.[1] In Canada, roaming bundles of 20 or 50 minutes provide a bulk amount of airtime at a reduced cost. Roaming is automatically disabled for tablets but can be manually activated by calling Vidéotron customer care.