Humberto Saabedra is the Editor-in-Chief of AnimeNews.bizPhoneNews.com and an occasional columnist for Ani.me. He can also be found musing on things at @AnimeNewsdotbiz

14 responses to “Sprint to Purchase Virgin Mobile USA”

  1. JJ

    Engadget said that it is a done deal and sprint purchased vm for 483million. Good for them! They are doing a lot of cool things.

  2. Ken

    I wonder how many will this add to the 49.1 million.

  3. Ro

    Where the hell did Sprint find $483 million?? I thought they were still bleeding customers and losing money.

  4. Duker

    Virgin has about 4 or 5 million subscribers

  5. JJ

    Does the 49 million customers include boost customers?

  6. Christopher Price

    Sprint includes Virgin Mobile and Boost Mobile customers in their 49 million count. This is because Sprint fully owns Boost Mobile, and was already co-owning Virgin Mobile with Virgin.

    Sprint also includes other smaller MVNOs that they wholesale to in that tally.

  7. Cristian Ruiz

    @ Christopher Price

    Sprint does NOT include boost mobile nor Virgin mobile to it’s costumer count due to the fact that Boost Mobile is a pre paid service meaning that costumers are not forced to sign 2 year contracts, meanwhile it also does not include Virgin mobile for the same reasons as Boost and because sprint only owned 13% of the company.

  8. Don Louie

    Chris is right and Cris is wrong, still think they should’ve bought iPCS. Even with this they still lost 1M subs the past quarter

  9. DP

    I still feel that Sprint will buy out iPCS before they’re forced to divest portions of the iDEN network next year. I don’t believe that this acquisition precludes that possibility. I also think that Sprint should at least explore to feasibility of a merger with US Cellular which also had a down Q2. Obviously Sprint’s last merger didn’t go as well as hoped, but a merger with USCC would be a lot less painful due to the fact that both carriers utilize CDMA. I imagine somebody will eventually gobble them up, so why not try to merge before at&t or someone else devours USCC?

  10. Don Louie

    That would be less of a merger than the Nextel one based on subscribers alone, makes since though being they missed out on the Alltel train. I could finally use my phone on the “L” here if it did happen, they still should’ve went after before VM

  11. Christopher Price

    Cristian Ruiz, as Don Louie has said, you’re wrong. Sprint does include affiliates and all MVNOs in the 49 million tally. This has been well-documented and confirmed by Sprint.

    It doesn’t matter the ownership percentage… if a call goes to a customer across Sprint’s CDMA or iDEN networks, they’re considered a customer in the 49 million tally. You may not agree with that (and I can understand that), but that is how Sprint gets to 49 million.

  12. Don Louie

    48.8M now

  13. Nisa YOung

    HEllo! I have Virgin mobile. I am very excited that Sprint purchased Virgin mobile. I love Virgin mobile I’ve had it for almost 5 years. I do think that they needed a pick me up…: )