It’s back to school time and for prepaid wireless customers, it’s sign up and save season. Parents want to keep in touch with their students in transit to and from school and during any after school activities. Traditionally, moms and dads will upgrade their devices, handing down their old phones to the kids in order to save money and look for the best deals in prepaid wireless.
Boost mobile answered the call with a back to school promo catered especially for those with unlocked or compatible devices. The banner ad, right on their homepage, is aimed directly at Metro and Cricket. The banner claims “go back to school with up to 50% off Metro & Cricket.” The promo details include:
- 1 free sim card
- Free shipping
- 1 month of service with the $25 unlimited plan (unlimited tak, text, 30gb high speed data allotment, then speeds may slow to 512kpbs for the remainder of the billing cycle)
- Autopay is required, $35 without autopay
- Available to new customers only
- Offer not available in some locations (check availability on website)
The $25 plan is also a promotional plan for new customers only scheduled to be available at least until November. The plan was originally scheduled to be available until the end of August. Customers who signup for the plan will be able to renew it indefinitely for $25/month with autopay.
There are new TV commercials and streaming video ads playing nationwide in English and Spanish that claim the $25 unlimited plan is the lowest unlimited plan on the market. The commercials support the $25 plan featured with the back to school promo on the website, and point to their competitors by using a boxer to demonstrate how other carriers treat their customers. The ads use the tagline “unleash your power” and don’t mention it as a back to school promo, only as a $25 unlimited plan. You can watch one of the streaming ads below which has already been viewed over 680k times since launching just two weeks ago. The same ad run on TV has been aired over 1300 times.
It is clear Boost has challenged competitors Metro and Cricket with both the banner ad on the website, and with the TV commercials. But which of them actually offers a truly unlimited plan? Metro by T-Mobile offers unlimited talk, text, and data starting at $40 monthly, with possible network deprioritization after 35gb of data usage. Cricket’s unlimited plans start at $55 monthly with anytime deprioritization possible during periods of high network congestion. Neither require auto-pay to sign up, nor do they throttle speeds after a data allotment has been reached.
Competition among the MVNOs will always be feisty. In this case, to draw on Boost’s boxing reference, they are fighting outside their weight class in terms of data access. Metro and Cricket both offer superior unlimited plans with fewer restrictions. While Boost’s $25 plan is around half the price, it isn’t unlimited.
Boost Mobile has been advertising its new plan in stores, as noted by the firm Wave7 Research in a prepaid report the publication recently sent out to its subscribers.
"It's good to see Boost making a highly competitive move like this. This is a competitive offer with TV and radio ad support and has led to increased sales, Wave7 Research has reported." -- Jeff Moore, Principal of Wave7 Research
If only they let customers to ACTUALLY buy the plan online. It’s impossible. System won’t let you complete the transaction with multiple error messages when you try.
If I needed “unlimited” data, Boost Mobile’s $25/month plan would be tempting, even with only the first 30GB of data at high speed. I’m currently paying $19/month for 1GB data (+ unlimited talk/text) with Twigby, and for just $1 more each month, could double that data bucket by switching to PureTalk (with discounts for AMAC members like me, plus usually promo codes through some of the video podcasts I follow). I am so thankful that I have a “universal unlocked” smartphone (a Moto X4), which gives me the flexibility to switch from Verizon-based Twigby to AT&T-based PureTalk without any problems.