In what is the biggest, if not the quietest surprise today, Virgin Mobile’s Facebook page has confirmed that the operator will be offering unlimited prepaid data access for $40 a month in the future. The new offering will replace its previous $20/$40/$60 tiers launched earlier this year and signals the operators intent to undercut every carrier in the US on data pricing.
The operator is still listing its current $10/$20/$40/$60 data plans, with internal Sprint documentation confirming that the offering will launch this Tuesday, August 24th.
I tried Cricket’s mobile broadband, and I never saw anything faster than 600kbps. It wasn’t as reliable as Sprint’s mobile broadband either. Will this be just as bad?
Sprint has recently implemented a lot of QoS controls… we’ve covered some of those previously.
While Sprint customers will always be favored over Boost/Virgin customers in data situations, the short-term outlook for these plans is great. Sprint is probably the most undersold carrier in America today for their infrastructure. As such, Virgin customers will at least at first enjoy megabit-grade speeds.
Now, if people start replacing their DSL lines with MiFis, that’s where things start to be a bit concerning. I suspect Sprint will throttle bandwidth-heavy Virgin customers only however, and only in times of peak demand.
It’s a great deal, and as Verizon goes to metered data, customers may start trading their smartphones on other providers for Wi-Fi only devices and feature phones in order to take advantage of this offering. Even at $10/month more, this blows away the previously best deal out there of 5 GB of Mobile Hotspot with the Palm Pre/Pixi Plus on Verizon.
Still, it’s a good question. Would you rather pay $30/month for unlimited handset data, with some limited tethering (either through hacks like PDANet or the aforementioned deal), or pay $40 for a MiFi and juggle a few devices in your pocket? My bet is enough people will opt for the $40/month MiFi to keep Virgin snatching up new adds for quite awhile.
We’ll be picking one up on Tuesday and reporting on how it goes.
Only other plan that comes close to this on post-paid is T-Mobile’s $40/5 Gig no-overage modem/netbook plan. Which I thought was great, but hey…you can’t beat this VirMo deal with a stick. Even the Europeans don’t give you this, and I used to think their ultra-competitive business model was really something lol. Makes my $40/250 Meg BroadBand plan on Verizon pretty sad indeed. But I won’t do $60/mo for 5 Gig when free wi-fi is available now even where I used to NEED their poor value for dollar 3G. To be fair to them, their network is rock-solid but their speeds have really deteriorated where I use their network. I’ve never been all that wild aabout Sprint or their pre-paid affiliates, but I hope this VirMo deal really pans out for them, if for only competition’s sake.
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