FreedomPop Expands to Europe with Free Service Too Michael Kwan July 10, 2014 FreedomPop has been offering its “freemium” wireless service in the United States for a couple of years now. You can pick up something like the FreedomPop Overdrive Pro mobile hotspot, getting a full 500MB of free data each month. Heck, you can even get the completely free mobile plan for your cell phone service and never pay a penny. Well, it looks like the folks at FreedomPop are broadening their horizons, because the service is being expanded to Europe. The European expansion of FreedomPop will start in Belgium. As you may already know, FreedomPop operates as an MVNO off the Sprint network in the United States. For their Belgian operations, they’re turning to local carrier BASE, which is a subsidiary of KPN from the Netherlands. FreedomPop says it wants to start with a relatively smaller market, so it can iron out any kinks before moving to larger countries in the EU. By partnering with KPN, it may have an easier time setting up MVNOs with KPN partners in other European countries as well. To start, FreedomPop will offer the people of Belgium the same free wireless plan as the one in the United States. That includes 500MB of data, 200 voice minutes and 500 text messages. They haven’t worked out the paid plans yet, but they will be “competitive” and will likely offer similar upgrades as the US counterparts. You can expect to pay for more data, more minutes and faster speeds. One crucial difference between the American and European versions of FreedomPop is that the latter will be a SIM-only service for the time being and users will need to supply their own unlocked phones. This means that they won’t be selling the “Snowden” privacy phone, at least for now. After Belgium, FreedomPop plans to roll into Germany, France, Spain and the UK “in the coming months,” as well as into markets in the Pacific Rim some time too. Via TC Share This With The World!
