Sprint Unlimited Data, Talk, and Text for $15/Month With Global Roaming

One of the most brilliant marketing plays I’ve seen in a long time was Sprint building an ad campaign around bringing on the actor from Verizon’s ‘Can You Hear Me Now?’ commercials?

  • Can you hear me now was a successful and memorable campaign It underscored Verizon’s strength in coverage.

  • Having Verizon’s ‘spokesperson’ switch means you should give a second look not really, but if the guy who cared about coverage more than anything else stands up for Sprint (come on, he’s being paid) that’s really noticeable and gets the message across Sprint wants to send about its own network.

I anchor to past experience. I was a Sprint customer until 2006. They had a tower right next to my office, and while their network wasn’t the greatest they had the best service where I was most of the time. I went off their network when I moved and service at home was poor. I wouldn’t normally even think of going back even though I’ve moved since then.

However they’re offering what looks like an amazing deal. New customers who port their number over from another carrier get unlimited data, talk and text for $15 per line per month. This even includes international roaming.

Data speeds do appear to be throttled for streaming video and music although I don’t much care myself about streaming on my phone. I use it for email, calls, travel provider apps, light web browsing and real time directions. Still I’m not sure I want to sign up for Sprint’s network and throttled internet. I can’t tether other devices with this plan, so I’d need to pay for a wireless hotspot separately since I do use that feature.

This is a bring your own device plan, you can buy a phoen from them or use your existing unlocked phone — but older phones tend not to be compatible across all networks. Your device needs to work with Sprint, which you can look up here.

This isn’t quite a fit for me, but I suspect there are many folks reading this would be hard pressed to find better value.

(HT: samwise6222)

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. Ported my number to Sprint last October when they had the one year free deal. Sprint assured me my device was an approved device on their network, which it wasn’t. Burned a hard pull for nothing and I was without service for 24 hours. I wouldn’t go back to Sprint at any price.

  2. I have Google Fi and think it’s great for overseas. Anyone looking to switch needs to take a hard look at Fi if the go overseas. Uses your normal data useage like your in the states. Texts are free. Only difference is non-Wifi calls are $0.20/minute. I’m four Int’l trips in and haven’t needed to make one non-Wifi call….so no extra fees.

  3. You consider paying $180 more than their free service plan a deal?

    Stick to planes.

  4. That offer — https://www.sprint.com/en/shop/offers/free-unlimited.html — is a great deal for one year. It was even better when the sprint free plan qualified for American Airlines miles (it no longer does).

    However it’s free for ONE YEAR ONLY. Then it jumps to $60/month. So your break-even is at month 16. And you start coming out ahead $45/month every month starting in month 17.

    The free plan is only better if you want to switch your service again in a year.

  5. I switched to Sprint on a deal. My bill was lower, but, 3 phones, we used an average of 3 GB of data a month. Why so little data? We couldn’t get data service most places. Yes, they could hear me now, but I wanted to use my smartphone (as a smartpgone) everywhere and could not. I am now back to the super high Verizon bill and enjoying it

  6. @Gary, admitted I didn’t think the free plan would be combinable with the 20/25k AAdvantage bonus miles offer but where do you see that it doesn’t? The terms and conditions just say activate a new line and have it open for 30 days.

    Does this new $15/mo. unlimited plan quality?

  7. Sprint’s motto should be: “Sprint, we’re not as bad as we used to be”

  8. @TProphet – as I write above the monthly cost jumps to $60 after year one with that offer, it’s a good deal if you want to switch after one year

  9. I just changed my service over from Sprint to T-Mobile less than two hours ago. Sprint is aggressively seeking new customers and offering them excellent deals not available to people like me, loyal customers who’ve been with them 12-15 years, I can’t recall it’s been so long.
    Enjoy your new customers, Sprint. You just lost an old one.

  10. We were very, very longtime Sprint users but switched to T-Mobile when T-Mo came out with their global access plan. When I contacted Sprint to return the signal booster…(even though I live in the middle of Houston with glass on three sides), no one said thank you for being a longtime customer or asked why we were changing providers. We have never regretted our changeover.

    T-Mo’s Simple Choice no-contract, BYOD, monthly plan with “unlimited data (though can be a bit slow depending on the country) and texting in ~140 countries” serves us well. 0.20cents per minute for voice calls over network but WhatsApp fills in the gap for this. • During special promos, T-Mo even ups the data speed to LTE, example…. during the World Cup in Brazil.

    I get the odd charge of 0.20cents (like on my last statement) for a voicemail that hit at just the wrong time. But T-Mo’s customer service has always been very helpful and issued credits. Cheerfully!!!!!

    Happy and don’t plan to change even if Sprint is temporarily cheap…or free.

  11. I want to see if it’s worthwhile to just get this as go-to personal phone for overseas and then a backup phone for local use. By “Global Roaming Included”, does it really mean that there is absolutely NO extra charge for using data at LTE (or least 3G) in approved countries? I am not good at reading fine print.

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