Sprint is removing its famous Framily plan and replacing it with new pricing and doubling the data in an attempt to attract more customers.
Recently appointed CEO Marcelo Claure announced the changes on Monday at an employee event in which a number of high-ranking Sprint executives were doused in icy water in a fundraiser for the ALS Foundation.
"We did a lot of research with customers. Data use is growing exponentially; customers are getting angry at a bill that is larger than they expected," said Claure about the new plans, which offer double the amount of data than many competitors. "We decided to make it easy and double whatever is in the market. This is the best offer ever in the marketplace."
Customers who switch to Sprint will be able to have up to 10 wireless lines on one account, all sharing 20 GB of data, with the price being $100 per month. Competitor T-Mobile currently offers four lines with 10 GB of data for the same price.
Furthermore, Sprint will offer an extra 2 GB of data for each line that's added, meaning that if a user was to max out at 10 lines, a total of 40 GB would be available between those 10 lines.
The new Sprint plans will do away with the "Framily" name and instead be called the "Sprint Family Share Pack."
Data has become a main selling point for carriers, who now often offer unlimited talk and text on their plans.
The market has been waiting for Sprint to start a carrier price war and thankfully that time has come. Despite this, Sprint is not done announcing new plans yet, with Claure mentioning that Sprint would be making more moves to win over customers.
In fact, Sprint's competitors are not standing still at the news of Sprint's new prices. Verizon also cut prices, offering customers of its single-line 2 GB plan a 20 percent decrease in price, now standing at $60 per month.
Sprints new plans are generally aimed at winning over customers who are currently on other carriers, and it offers to "pretty much reimburse" customers who switch to Sprint and have to pay an early-termination fee.
Despite Sprint's newly appointed prices, the carrier still is rated the worst in terms of overall network quality of the big four carriers, including Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T, according to a report by RootMetrics. Claure is moving to upgrade the network, however.
Sprint has been losing customers every year since 2007 under ex-CEO Dan Hesse's direction. Claure was named the new CEO of the company earlier this month as the company halted its plans to buy T-Mobile.
"We heard a pretty loud message from the government that they weren't ready for consolidation, so we had to focus Sprint on growth," Claure said. "It's no secret we have been losing customers and that we have an uneven cost base. We are going to run this company to get back to growth."
Will Sprints plans ignite the anticipated mobile carrier price war? At this point it's still uncertain, but the signs point to "yes."
