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Sprint and Best Buy are coming together to offer students 12 months of free talk, text, and data on Sprint’s Unlimited, My Way plan with purchase of a smartphone from Best Buy. The free Unlimited, My Way Student Promotion plan includes unlimited talk, unlimited text, and 1GB of data. After surpassing the included 1GB of data, students will be billed at 1.5 cents per MB. Furthermore, student lines can add unlimited data for an additional $10 per month.
Sprint and Best Buy are also allowing students to gain additional months of free service by activating referral lines. For every additional new phone line of service activated on normal Unlimited, My Way or My All-in plans on the account with the student line at Best Buy, the student account gets an additional 12 months of free talk, text, and 1GB of data. The additional line must activated during the offer’s promotional period at Best Buy.
It seems students of all ages are eligible ranging from part-time, full-time or vocational students enrolled in elementary school, middle school, high school, college, university or other accredited institutes here in the United States.
The promotion runs from November 11, 2013 through January 4, 2014. If you have any additional questions, head on over to Sprint’s Frequently Asked Questions support page to learn more about their current student promotion.
Thanks Champ!
Hell has frozen over!!!
It will be fun to see if people will tolerate Sprint’s crappy network even for free.
They now have 800Mhz rolling out that significantly improves coverage. I use over 10GB/month and getting 6-20Mbps, ATT/VZW not even a doable option as they charge too much for each additional GB.
Have to get a newer triband phone though that does 800/1900/2500, like Nexus 5, LG G2 or most any future phone.
Network Vision 2.0…a network so bad Sprint couldn’t give it away…..
My question is what about current customers who are students that are in the middle of a contract?
Has to be a new line or an added new line to an existing Sprint MyWay account (ie must be new sprint phone number)
it’s so funny seeing sprint give away free everything while Verizon has no deals at all and wants north of $60 a month for 1gb of data
I’m assuming you mean it’s funny because Verizon is still going to crush Sprint in subscriber adds.
T-Mobile will be besting them all in subscriber adds for a while, just as they did last quarter (if you subtract tablets, which t-mobile doesn’t do much of yet).
That may change as Sprint rolls out more 800Mhz LTE, which significantly improves coverage. Tmobile doesn’t have a lower band to fill in the coverage gaps.
Check that again they didn’t lead the pack. Verizon Wireless added 1.1 million new subscribers, Tmobile added 1 million.
Far more importantly, out of VZW’s 1.1 million net adds, 927k of them were postpaid. Compare that to tmobiles number which were only 648k postpaid. 40% of tmobile net adds came from MVNO’s (non-Tmobile branded network resellers) which have a significantly higher churn than branded postpaid.
Sure, but T-mobile still beat V in adds (postpaid + prepaid), when you subtract tablets. ARPU is increasing too, but, yeah, still not as profitable as the biggies.
VZW wishes it sold 100k in tablets in one quarter. Not sure where you are pulling that from. Also an important note – Verizon is only reporting branded adds were 1.1 million, does not include MVNO additions.
Tmobile was reporting MVNO’s as well which added about 300k to their numbers. .
Yup
Explain to me what the functional difference on a phone is of 5Mbps or 20Mbps?
No one will explain it to you, because the don`t know what is the difference is, they are sitting behind the computer and just typing.
With sprint I get high latency and dial up speeds. If I could consistently pull 4mbps down I would stay with sprint. Oh well.
Will in my area VZW ad the other no much better than Sprint. So I been with Sprint for more than 11 Years and I am not going no where.
Call it a hunch but I think you are the minority. I have been with sprint for 11 years as well. The first 7 were good. Then my service kept getting worse. Then the promises of wimax, oh wait now we are going to lte, and still having 0.2mbps 3g speeds where I spend most my time. The last 4 years have been horrible for me. I would love to say otherwise.
On Sprint, it’s not the speed that gets you, it’s the latency.
Hmm, I get around 40-60ms maybe up to 100 latency on Sprint LTE. That’s pretty good.
You just said below you get 6-20mbs. Which is it.
Then apparently you haven’t actually measured the latency on their LTE.
I’m amazed your girlfriend gets any sort of reliable LTE on Sprint. When I saw LTE it was only 1-2 Mbps for my old HTC One. If you truly loved her you’d pay her ETF to get her away from them. LOL
I never seen Sprint 4G 5Mbps yet I always get Above 25 Mbps in my area. I live in southeast of Michigan.
Even though 5 Mbps it`s a lot for a normal user but, in these days even VZW has high speed on download still people complaining. So, Sprint or not Sprint the complainers will stay doing the same thing over and over.
Smartphone apps don’t need more than a few Mbps. I use over 10GB/month and would rather have 3Mbps unlimited than 100Mbps with a 5GB cap. (I tend to get 6-20Mbps on Sprint but I’m in a mostly completed market).
I been with Sprint for more than 11 years, I have 5 lines and we never used more than 6GB per a month.
This would be great if Sprint actually worked.
Do you have to pay the full “replacement device” cost in order to get this promotion? I was on chat for twenty minutes with a Sprint rep and they couldn’t tell me.
Almost. It is an outright cost but below Best Buy’s normal outright cost. They wil have special pricing for this promotion
Hate to repeat another’s post, but BB isnt offering a special pricing… http://www.bestbuy.com/site/mobile-phones/student-deals-phone-and-pricing/pcmcat317600050016.c?id=pcmcat317600050016&type=category&id=pcmcat317600050016
But. Sprint. No thanks.
“What happens at the end of the student’s free service?
Sprint will send the account holder a text message 30 days before the completion of free service on the student’s line. Upon completion of free service, the student line will be charged regular price for service for Unlimited, My Way ($70/month for unlimited talk, text and 1GB of data on smartphones ($50/month on basic phones with blocked data); additional $10/month for unlimited data, if applicable). To avoid charges, the account holder can terminate the student line by calling Sprint or dialing *2 from their mobile phone before the end of 12 months.”
No ETF?
I doubt it. Since they are buying the phone subsidized from best buy.
I was told by a Sprint rep today that you have to either give the phone back, or pay the ETF. They also told me it was the full subsidized 2 year price. So $240 ETF at 12 months.
You were told wrong. You buy the phone; so its yours to keep. There is no ETF . After one year; they convert you to a normal My Way plan; as it says in their faq.
lol it’s all perception. I just read an article where verizon lte has been slowing dramatically too. A lot of these places are capacity strained areas. Where sprint is getting the 1-2mbps, but when they run spark in every city then I would guess sprint will add more customers than all the carriers. 2014 will be a huge year for sprint. Speed test below shows sprint td lte pulling 52 mbps.
If it’s like their current LTE rollout, it’ll take another 5 years before Spark has a decent footprint. I’m betting that Speedtest was taking right next to a tower. In the Bay Area, Sprint LTE averaged like 5-6 mbps with an intermittent LTE connection at best.
That is great. Its too bad its in only 3 cities, their 3g sucks so when you lose lte your screwed and you need one of the 3 new phones recently released. This means people that just started or are in a 2 year contract will suffer for a minimum of 2 years. By that time t-mobile will have expanded and offer better speeds. That is why currently I have a tmobile line and a sprint line. I will be watching both closely. Although I may be canceling sprint sooner that i thought.
Sprint has the lowest margins of any of the big four wireless carriers so this seems to come off as somewhat desperate… Possibly to defuse some of that tmobile momentum theyve had recently?
Their service is so horrible they’re offering it free.
I think most people post here just to express hatred for something they don’t even use or understand. I think This is a great deal for students like myself.
Anyone would take Sprint’s service if it were free and use it on a secondary phone. I wouldn’t use it on a primary phone though.
My personal opinion…. as a past Verizon user and current sprint. I think your crazy and disrespecting yourself to stay with Verizon. Sprints service isn’t bad. And Verizon holds too much from you, updates are slow, brand there phones horribly, and tooo much bloatware. I get more for less. I would be paying 145 @ version for mu 80 at sprint.
and what costs 80 at sprint could cost you 40 at republic wireless…
(disclosure: i’m a customer and a community ambassador on their forums)
Point taken and seen.
Man I would have loved this as a student, especially during my sophomore year when I ate nothing but ramen, pasta, and sandwiches.
(i find it humorous that Ramen doens’t qualify as pasta…)
Comparing sensorly.com’s coverage maps (4g and non 4g) for Sprint (1900MHz) with their competitors, you will see that Sprint has good coverage in the most populous metro areas of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington D.C., San Francisco, etc…
Better coverage than T-Mobile & Metro-PCS put together and arguably better than AT&T & Cricket put together; maybe not necessarily better speed and/or latency, but I believe that is all about to change.
Sprint could of not survived a re-banding nightmare of Nextel with Public Safety Radio Systems and then the shutting down of that 800MHz spectrum if it did not have that good nationwide coverage. Sprint just reported it’s first quarterly profit in years.
The problem Sprint was having until recently was a lack of the new fiber optic / microwave last mile back haul from the tower to the central station to support data hungry smartphones with unlimited data.
The problem Sprint is now having is a lack of wireless spectrum in their 1900MHz holdings in some markets as they re-allocated a portion for LTE use.
Well if you haven’t heard the news yet, Sprint bought out Clearwire (Sprint WiMax on sensorly.com) with the cash infusion they received from their acquisition by Softbank.
By the way, Softbank has been on a roll with previous and new wireless, internet, and content partnerships and investments (about 1300 and counting I believe) in mostly Asian emerging markets. Most note worthy for those who are considering which carrier to choose is a company called Brightstar (it’s name was derived from part of the two major distributors that it forced out of South America and Central America), now the largest distributor of cellphones worldwide.
Clearwire had worked closely with others to test, develop, and standardize the TD flavor of LTE that is more efficient and has higher bandwidth in the 2.5GHz spectrum used worldwide for Wimax and now TD-LTE. Clearwire was constrained in deploying that new standard until recently being absorbed by Sprint which Dish Network contested and failed with multiple counter offers on two fronts.
Now Sprint (with the rest of Softbank’s cash infusion and further investment from returns on other investments as well as cheap financing) can put their TD-LTE deployment in high gear and at the same time re-purpose those 800MHz spectrum now free from the Nextel shutdown. Sprint’s tri-band phones will be taking advantage of these two additional frequencies in the near future and thereby reduce congestion currently being experienced on the 1900MHz frequency in some markets while allowing Sprint’s customer base to grow and continue using (if post-paid, non-throttled) unlimited data in those high populous markets.
I work for T-Mobile in Los Angeles. The customers that I get the most number transfers from is Sprint due to lack of data coverage. So no they don’t have better coverage as you say ;)
That is very true. I recently switched my wife from her sprint account to tmobile. But I kept my sprint account because even though sprints current data is slow their overall coverage is far better than tmobile. So for now I will keep sprint. Plus with their new triband phones and their lte expansion they are getting better slowly.
Anyway to pay subsidized pricing for phones? Paying $800.00 in installments kills me :(
Yes, but what are the numbers that then switch AWAY from TMobile when they find out you don’t have a network outside city limits?
if u work for a cellular company u should understand the difference between a lack of coverage and a lack of spectrum, just look at sensorly maps, but just don’t tell your potential customers to look at it, and don’t tell them Sprint is about to light up 800MHz and 2.5GHz to complement their 1900MHz
I recently left sprint from T-Mobile and I just have to say this. I live in new York city and their service is absolutely horrible. I could be standing in one spot and move two feet and lose service. I also lived about a few miles from one of their towers and I would barely get service in my house. my battery wouldn’t last more than two or three hours because my phone was on constant search for service. so yeah sprint is horrible.
left sprint and went to T-Mobile*
You were experiencing the lack of overall spectrum Sprint had and that has recently effectively dealt with when they shutdown Nextel to re-purpose that long range & high penetration 800MHz spectrum and absorbing the other 50% of Clearwire and their high bandwidth 2.5GHz & high efficient TD-LTE spectrum. I think I read it’s just a matter of adding a card or two at the base of the tower and making a configuration update on those towers that have already been prepped for Sprint’s Network Vision. But part of the relief will be the newer phones that will use the new frequencies (I got my Kyocera Torque a few months ago, it will be able to use 800MHz I think but not the 2.5MHz and may only use 800MHz when 1900MHz is not available), it will take time and probably some phones to be updated. I forgot to mention they have a boat load of that 2.5MHz, typically 160MHz in most metro areas.
CDMA is Code Division Multiplexing and TDMA is Time Divion Multiplexing. Sprint & Verizon’s CDMA technology is designed for better efficiency than T-Mobile & AT&T’s TDMA version of their 3G technology. But a tradeoff is that if the number of CDMA connections allowed are maxed out with a given Sprint or Verizon tower, the weakest connections (farther from the tower or indoors) will lose bars and service as you experienced. I guess that is better than allowing more and more TDMA connections crowd the tower until conversations get garbled.
I suppose if you happen to live in one of the few places where Sprint has towers and happen to never leave that tiny little area.
…which basically excludes my entire state and most of the adjacent area. Sprint coverage is a joke unless you’re city-locked.
Isn’t this how drug dealers work?
Terrible Network and awful service period….No Thank you.
So, I was going to go down after work and get my son a phone. Nope. Not at full retail price.
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/mobile-phones/student-deals-phone-and-pricing/pcmcat317600050016.c?id=pcmcat317600050016&type=category&id=pcmcat317600050016
I mean this is a cool idea. However most students who would take advantage of this program probably dont have the money to buy the phone they want up front and that is probably more important to them. I would think making every phone free and clearing activation fees, credit check fees, or something in that field would be b easier on the students. Seems to me that they didnt want to attract to many people.
now which student can afford those phone prices? even parents would not shell out that sort of cash for a kiddy phone?