Following the previously confirmed changes to throttling policies in March, the changes may foreshadow even bigger changes to Boost’s service plans, which are said to mirror current industry trends in flat-rate monthly prepaid and eventually do away with the Shrinkage price reduction strategy that has been its hallmark for a few years.
According to the yet unconfirmed details, on or after May 6th (which was the original date for the throttling changes before being moved to the 16th), Boost will slowly phase out the current plan slate for the following new monthly service plans that mirror Aio and MetroPCS in terms of pricing:
- unlimited talk/text with 500mb of monthly data for $40
- unlimited talk/text with 2.5gb monthly for $50
- unlimited talk/text and 5gb monthly for $60
- No shrinkage
- 128kbps throttle after monthly data allotment
The current Shrinkage-based service plans are said to remain in place during the new plan introduction period for an unspecified amount of time. In another major change from the current slate, the new service plans are also said to be universal across devices whether they be smartphone, feature phone or BlackBerry without the current tiering for device type, which would be an easier slate to manage for Boost Mobile customers than the current plan slate with Shrinkage. However, the changes make little sense for Boost without some sort of Boost-exclusive trump card.
In order for these new plans to make sense, they would also have to be introduced with a trump card, such as reimplementing BYOSD on an official level with national marketing or keeping Shrinkage with additional changes designed to reduce the time needed to earn discounted rates, there’s very little to differentiate the rumored plans from MetroPCS and Aio otherwise.
The extensive plan changes being described sound like a stopgap to bring in more customers while Network Vision is being completed and the increasing pressure being placed on the brand by other competitors may have been a key driver for the plan changes, but it remains to be seen whether this will even pan out next month.
