Becker reports, “Virgin said that starting Wednesday, it will offer a $40 nationwide unlimited mobile broadband plan, which replaces its existing $20, $40 and $60 metered plans. The existing plan that costs $10 for 10 days of metered access will remain available ‘for less frequent Internet users,’ Virgin said.”
“Virgin’s move to unlimited broadband contrasts wireless giant AT&T Inc.’s recent switch from unlimited data plans on its flagship Apple Inc. iPhone to metered plans for new customers,” Becker reports. “The new plans will be available online Wednesday and will roll out at retail stores ‘in the coming weeks,’ Virgin said.”
Full article here.
This would go good with a MyFi setup.
What I’d really like to see though is just prepaid broad, so I only pay for what I use, and renew when I run out. That’s probably the least profitable though, so I doubt we’ll see it.
Virgin Mobile has a wi-fi hot spot (Novatel 2200) that runs over Spint. It’s a one time buy with NO 2-yr fee like the opposition.
http://www.virginmobileusa.com/mobile-broadband
here’s a non-subscriber link (non-WSJ)
http://www.pcworld.com/article/203976/virgin_mobile_launches_contractfree_unlimited_mobile_broadband.html
haven’t looked into this, but could I use this on my Mac Mini? Also how fast is their broadband?
Could this be in preparation for iPhone?
Does Sir Richard know Mr. Jobs? I hope they are friends!
I’ve been hoping for a Sprint iPhone for a while. They look to be more aggressive with their plans than others.
In fact, I wish Apple would just BUY Sprint and roll out their own game changing network.
What the world needs is a volley of lawsuits, campaigns, and assorted methods of intimidation to end the stupid “pay for what you think you’ll use” scheme common in the mobile marketplace (with its absurd penalties for overuse and no credits for underuse) and a turn to “pay for what you actually used” scheme.
Imagine if you had to prepay for electricity, or water, or landline phone use, with 100% or 200% penalties if you exceeded what you prepaid for; or if you had to buy all your groceries on the first of the month, and pay a premium for anything purchased thereafter. The current mobile marketplace is all about consumer abuse.
Military Police:
Well, your cable bill is also flat-rate (you don’t pay per watched show; you pay a flat fee, never watching 98% of channels you receive). You pay flat monthly fee for your health club membership (and not each time you go for a work-out). There are many, many services out there that are established on a monthly flat fee, where your usage of them varies from month to month. Some of them are available on a per-use basis, some are only available on monthly subscription.
The reality is, for many, these types of services are significantly less expensive under flat monthly plan than on per-use basis (if such were available).
@ Military police
To further your analogy, what if you got charged more for electricity you used to cook with, or to watch tv with. Thats how telcos treat data and text.
Sprint (and Virgin Mobile USA, and Boost) are all CDMA. As such, they represent a fairly small minority, both in US, and especially in the world. It is trivial to design and manufacture an iPhone with a CDMA chip (virtually all mobile handset makers have been doing precisely this for ages), but it is unlikely that Apple would favour a technology that represents a very small minority (never mind technical merits of it).
It’s disingenuous for the telco’s to advertise 5mbps and the like, and then try to cap your usage.
@Predrag
Sprint has somewhere in the region of 60-70 million subscribers, Verizon has 70-100 million.
So while on a pie chart they may seem insignificant, I would say that Apple would love a shot at selling an additional 100-170 million iphones. They are after all a hardware company.
Add in the additional benefit of watching other carriers networks buckle, perhaps it acts as the catalystr to finally improve the craptacular networks we have in the US..
If you think for a single minute Apple cannot design and ship a single iphone with radios to work with either network standard, you are foolish.
Predrag
Try South America for CDMA.
The first sentence of that article “Sprint Nextel Corp. Virgin mobile….” sounds like something a NASCAR driver would say after a race, or a quote from Ricky Bobby.
OMG Predrag! Verizon alone has more subs than AT&T on their “small minority” CDMA network. Add to that the subs on Sprint, Virgin and all the other smaller CDMA carriers and you have a vast overwhelming MAJORITY of CDMA handsets in the US. Apple is going to let that go by the wayside? Just because Predrag thinks he knows better than Steve Jobs? The US represents probably one of the biggest still untapped resources of future iPhone sales once this exclusivity contract with AT&T expires. And Steve Jobs is going to what? Wait? Wait for Android to get a bigger foothold in the US market? LTE, as much as any of the carriers would like to say, is still too far away from any type of significant deployment capable of supporting a full scale iPhone launch. It will probably be 1 – 2 years at least before LTE becomes what 3G is today. That is a LONG time in the mobile space, and to let such a “small minority” of technology just sit for that long of a time without a true iPhone model to service it would be Steve Jobs’ biggest blunder ever!
Comparing CDMA usage in total to the the global usage of GSM, which is rightfully what I think you were trying to say, then yes CDMA is in the minority. But again for the reasons stated above, that does not warrant the wholesale bypass of CDMA. The total subscriber base of CDMA while small compared to GSM is no where small enough to ignore until 4G is rolled out!
I would love iPhone on Sprint- very underrated, works in my house, unlike Verizon- aggressive pricing, great customer service. Google-Verizon is evil, and Sprint is first choice over AT& T.
Thank you, Virgin!!! Ordered mine yesterday. This is so awesome, because I can finally cancel my Sprint Wireless Modem which was $55 per month, and I had to pay monthly whether I used it or not. I only use it twice per year, and Sprint wouldn’t let me go on a month-to-month or prepaid plan. Thank you, Virgin!!!!
Been eyeballin’ Virgin’s Mi-Fi for my wi-fi ‘Pad, new iMac, iPod touch and future MBP. this could prove…. interesting.
Hmmm… could Sprint be trying to send a hint about “something” to Apple?
AHA! So there actually is a reason Sprint remains in business! Competition lives on… and the consumer benefits.
Beat that AT & T!