Sprint CEO Dan Hesse announced today in an earnings conference call that his company's prepaid brands, Virgin Mobile and Boost Mobile, will launch WiMAX 4G, just as the main Sprint brand is moving away from WiMAX and towards LTE.
It sounds odd, but this is actually a good deal for everyone involved. Sprint has committed to keeping the WiMAX network, which covers about a third of the U.S. population, live until 2015. But it's going to start aggressively moving Sprint customers off of WiMAX at the end of this year.
Clearwire's WiMAX network, which Sprint uses, is cheap for Sprint to use. And it isn't expanding, which means it isn't going to incur expensive build-out costs. The Sprint WiMAX network isn't truly nationwide, but it focuses in big cities, where most of the Virgin and Boost customers are located.
Virgin and Boost have been stuck so far on Sprint's 3G, which our Fastest Mobile Networks 2011 tests found is the slowest 3G network in the country. They've been OK with this so far, because Virgin and Boost customers are more focused on price than on speed.
Hesse didn't give any details on Virgin and Boost's timing or what phones or service plans with which they'd launch WiMAX.
Better Speed at a Better Price
So think about it: Sprint has a cheap-to-run network that it has to keep online until 2015. It has these two prepaid brands that could use some faster data. It's a perfect marriage.
Bringing WiMAX to Boost and Virgin, at least for a year or two, lets Sprint squeeze a bit more juice out of the WiMAX orange. It lets Boost and Virgin customers have unlimited data on a network that will become less crowded with Sprint users with time, at five times the speed they've seen previously.
And because Clearwire owns so much radio spectrum, there isn't likely to be any reduction in capacity on the WiMAX network for years.
The only down side is that Virgin and Boost won't have cutting-edge phones. Sprint has said it isn't putting any muscle behind the development of new WiMAX phones, so you're likely to just see retreads of the five existing devices Sprint offers: the Samsung Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch ($199.99), the Samsung Epic 4G ($99.99), the Motorola Photon ($99.99), the HTC EVO Design 4G($99.99) and the Samsung Conquer 4G ($49.99).
So it sounds odd, but I think this is a good deal. Virgin and Boost users will get unlimited, pretty high-speed data for existing plan prices, probably. Sprint gets to pluck the last few feathers off of the WiMAX chicken. Virgin and Boost's youthful customers will probably switch phones again by 2014. What's not to love?
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