Fido offering free hotspot access after making it a paid feature

Fido’s latest promotional offer adds free hotspot access to most of the provider’s plans just months after Fido started charging for the feature.

Back in April, the Rogers-owned wireless provider removed free hotspot access from its plans and started charging customers $5/mo for the feature. While the change didn’t impact existing customers, anyone who got one of Fido’s new plans would lose out on hotspot access unless they paid extra for it.

Now, all of Fido’s plans — including the basic talk and text option that doesn’t even come with data — include a “$0 hotspot promo.” Per Fido’s deals page, the hotspot promo adds hotspot access to plans for $0/mo. The promo is only available for a limited time and only for new activations.

Fido’s plans are otherwise unchanged, with some still coming with 10GB of bonus data. Additionally, customers can get a $10/mo discount for using automatic payments.

However, it’s hard to call this ‘promo’ a good deal when Fido is just returning a feature it took away to make a quick buck. It’s not a good look for wireless providers to take away useful features like hotspot access, then charge customers to get those features back. Coupled with some of Fido’s other recent actions, like increasing the connection fee to $80 and raising the cost of roaming rates, it’s tough to recommend Fido at all.

This is especially true when other wireless providers still include hotspot access in their plans. Why pay Fido $40/mo for 20GB of 4G data (capped at 150Mbps speed at that!) when you can get 60GB of 5G data and much more for the same price from the likes of Freedom and Public Mobile.