Cricket Wireless, AT&T's pre-paid subsidiary, announced a new prepaid unlimited plan that will begin April 17, 2016. This unlimited talk, text and data plan will cost customers $70 a month, which goes down to $65 a month if they sign up for Auto Pay.
Something to note is the data plan offers an unlimited amount of data you can use, not the speeds at which you can navigate.
Cricket also offers more affordable plans such as the Basic, Smart, and Pro data plans which go for $35, $45, and $55 a month using auto-pay.
Cricket was one of the fastest growing prepaid wireless companies in the US in 2015 according to John Dwyer, president of Cricket Wireless.
AT&T discontinued their unlimited data plans back in 2011.
Cricket Wireless is also offering a $100 dollar credit for anyone who switches over to the new service plan. This is in direct response to T-Mobile's new unlimited data plan. It will be interesting to see how effective the new data plan is and if it has a significant impact on T-Mobile. It will also be interesting to see how other wireless companies respond to this new deal.
ReplyDeleteIt will be interesting to see how other companies respond to this deal. It is likely that other phone companies will follow in Cricket's lead with unlimited data plans in order to stay competitive in the market. I am also interested to see how the fact that Cricket is prepaid will interact with customers switching over. Are consumers completely willing to switch from contracts to prepaid?
ReplyDeleteYeah if people sign up for auto-pay it may help the company to make a lot of money. It seems that when people sign up for that, they usually are going to remain subscribed to it for a longer period of time. Instead of the 70 dollars, which is prepaid and the individual can make the choice each month to continue the plan.
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting move for Cricket Wireless. While the plans themselves are cheap given the amount of services you get with them, the catch with prepaid plans is that the customer must buy the phone out right and usually with no discounts or deals. This means a much larger investment upfront to buy the phone than it would be to have a contract. However, it will be interesting to see where this goes with the auto-pay addition and how consumers will behave in the market.
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting move on the part of Cricket. It seems like they are seeing that in order to remain viable in the cell phone industry, they will definitely need to step up their plans and give incentives to possible consumers in order to attract them to the company. There are obviously some costs and benefits with a plan that offers unlimited components. On one hand, it is very enticing when a phone company offers unlimited internet since neither Verizon nor AT&T offer this kind of benefit, yet the phones are probably more expensive since with a plan like this, there are not normally other discounts on the phone itself so it will cost more upfront. It will be up to the consumer, at this point, to really decide what they think is more important-- a cheaper phone in the short run or a cheaper plan in the long run.
ReplyDeleteI think this is great. this could make the big time providers to lower their prices in fear of losing customers to cricket. it will be interesting to see how long cricket keeps the price this low until they decide to hike the price up like their competitors did.
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