As millions of Canadians scrambled to reconnect during Wednesday’s Bell network outage, one Waterloo startup says it’s built for this moment.
Sweat Free Telecom developed a digital safety net for smartphone users. Using embedded SIM (eSIM) technology, it offers backup data access across all three major Canadian carriers, plus hundreds of networks globally.
“We are trying to be the spare tire of your car. We are not trying to be your car,” said founder Chanakya Ramdev. “If you’re having a slow internet day, that’s where we can help.”
The product is an eSIM installed via QR code. It offers a failover plan for when networks go down or coverage drops out.
“We give people connectivity to Bell, Rogers, and Telus in Canada, AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile in the U.S., pretty much 100 countries, 200-plus networks,” Ramdev said. “It acts as a backup and as a bonus, it also helps people avoid paying roaming fees if they’re ever travelling overseas.”
Today’s outage - the latest reminder of how fragile the telecom infrastructure can be - hit Bell Canada users across Ontario, Quebec, and parts of Atlantic Canada. Bell later confirmed the outage wasn’t caused by a cybersecurity breach and promised a full review.
For Ramdev, the timing couldn’t be more validating. Sweat Free Telecom was born out of frustration with the 2022 Rogers outage, a far larger collapse that knocked out internet, mobile service, 911 access, debit payments, and government services for over 12 million Canadians for 26 hours.
Sweat Free Telecom didn’t begin in telecom. The company launched in 2016 as Sweat Free Apparel, a side hustle from a group of University of Waterloo grads making sweatproof undershirts. When the pandemic hit, they pivoted to PPE production and produced face coverings. As demand for protective gear levelled off, the team turned its focus to environmental tech. They designed small electric boats to clean plastic and debris from local lakes. But when the 2022 Rogers outage knocked out both the boats and Ramdev’s phone, everything went offline. That moment exposed a bigger problem and inspired their next pivot of building a telecom backup plan for a world that can’t afford to lose connection.
“Our boats went wild in the lakes because we never thought telecom networks could go down. So, we didn’t build any kind of redundancy,” he said. “All of my friends who had Bell had access to the internet, so they could continue living their lives. But I felt I was sent back to the Stone Age.”
That outage was ultimately traced to a human error during a system upgrade that flooded Rogers’ core routers with excessive traffic and caused a nationwide cascade failure. It prompted new federal policies requiring telecom companies to implement emergency roaming and share networks during outages.
Ramdev took that lesson to heart.
“Our phones are pretty much our single point of failure. If our phone goes down, our life pretty much goes down,” he said.
Sweat Free Telecom was originally launched in 2016 as Sweat Free Apparel out of the University of Waterloo. After several pivots through textiles, PPE, and environmental tech, the team landed on telecom and launched the eSIM as a way to offer redundancy in a digital-first world.
“We’re not trying to compete with the carriers, but we are trying to complement them,” Ramdev said. “People shouldn’t think of us as a substitute, but almost a supplement to what they already have.”
Their plans start at $15.99 for North America and $16.99 for global use, with no monthly fees and data that doesn’t expire.
“Our tech is ready,” Ramdev said. “We just have to go out there and now start selling it.”
