Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure has only held office for a month, but he is already making big moves to put Sprint back in the game. And one of these big moves is to take the iPhone 6 and offer it to customers for a price lower than Sprint's competitors can afford to offer.
Claure hopes Sprint's iPhone for Life plan will attract hordes of Apple fans who are hoping to get their hands on the iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus and take them away from rival T-Mobile and mobile titans AT&T and Verizon. The plan allows customers to lease their iPhones for a two-year period while paying only $20 a month on top of the $50 Sprint charges to provide customers unlimited calls, texts and data. At the end of the two years, customers will have to turn their phones in to upgrade to a new iPhone, which normally comes out every year.
The plan also gets rid of sales tax that buyers normally have to pay at the beginning of new contracts. Customers will also have the option to buy their iPhones but will have to pay $30 on top of the $50 access rate every month.
"We can offer unlimited data because of Spark," Claure says, referring to Sprint's 2.5 gigahertz spectrum acquired from Clearwire. "It's the reason why we're able to do some pretty interesting things with the iPhone 6."
"We think this is going to be one of the most successful launches, so therefore we decided that it requires a different rate plan. We're launching unlimited [data, voice and text] for $50 only for iPhone 6," he adds.
Claure, a self-made billionaire known for launching Brightstar Corp., the world's largest mobile phone distributor, has already instituted a number of major changes at Sprint. When he first met with employees, he said he was going to focus on three main areas: value proposition, network and cost to serve. On day two with Claure at the helm, Sprint quietly killed off its confusing Framily shared plans. The next day, the company followed by getting read of the annoying Frobinson family.
Just a week with Claure in office, Sprint introduced its Family Share Pack, which more than doubles the amount of data users can get from other shared plans offered by other carriers. Three days after that, Sprint introduced a new personal plan that offers unlimited data for $60, which is meant to undercut T-Mobile's $80 unlimited data plan. Verizon and AT&T do not offer unlimited plans, relying on their network stability to keep customers from switching over.
But Sprint is not finished. Offering competitive pricing is only the tip of the iceberg for its new CEO. On Thursday, a Sprint spokesperson stated that the company will not attend the Federal Communication Commission's (FCC) AWS-3 auction, which is expected to raise as much as $10 billion from companies bidding for radio spectrum. Instead, Sprint is waiting it out for the 600 Megahertz incentive auction the FCC will hold in mid-2015. 600 Megahertz is considered premium "beachfront property" in radio airwaves for having a wide reach and robust signals.
