Between July and November of last year, Sprint went about buying out the 83% of Virgin Mobile USA that it didn’t already own. At the time, GoMo News suggested this was because Sprint liked the pre-paid aspects of the Virgin business. And that has been born out this week, as Sprint has announced it is axing the post-paid plan from Virgin.
What’s this now?
Sprint has a very strong pre-paid presence through it’s Boost Mobile subsidiary. The pre-paid offering from Virgin was very similar to Boost, so it made sense for Sprint to acquire the network and its subscribers.
However, it seems that there’s no place in Sprint for people who subscribed to the Helios plan from Virgin. Helios is its post-paid service – and all 86,000 subscribers are being kicked off the network. If you’re a Helios customer and you haven’t switched your service by May 25th, then you’re shit out of luck. No service for you. Sprint will be cutting your connection on that date.
What we think?
It’s not quite as brutal as I’ve made it out there, actually. Sprint isn’t automatically popping Helios customers onto its own post-paid plan. But it is offering Helios customers a $50 dollar off deal if they switch to Sprint.
Picked up from MobileCrunch
