A poster on the HowardForums Sprint board has potentially revealed Sprint’s plan changes at the beginning of the new year.
Starting off, we have the name change to Power Packs, likely to coincide with the “Power Up” ad campaign.
Next, instead of the bucket of minutes for overage protection, customers would be relegated to a charge of $0.45/minute overage, decreasing to $0.25/minute on the more expensive price plans. Shared lines would keep the overage protection at $5/50 and $10/100 minutes, the catch being customers would have to call for the overage packages to be applied, or else be subject to the aforementioned single minute rate.
The rate plan changes are thought to move more inline with both Verizon and Cingular pricing structures and reports claiming that a majority of the customers had no need for the overage protection.
The next few possible changes affect the incoming call plans.  First is the addition of mobile to mobile calling, and the elimination of ReadyLink (Sprint’s 1xRTT based PTT system found on Sanyo and a few Samsung handsets.) as an included service to push more people toward Power Source (formerly Hybrid Network) handsets when available nationwide.
The last point is the convergence of iDEN data plans to a general service pack including messaging and mobile web access, with
the exception being Power Source having two packages, the only difference being quantity of messages at $10 for 1000 messages/unlimited web, $15 unlimited messaging/unlimited web.
Also planned is the elimination of the free month of Vision/Power Vision services, possibly due to low consumer retention and customer issues involving paying for Vision service when not used. PhoneNews.com will stay on top of this story and confirm it as soon as it is confirmed officially.
