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Woe are those who were excited about Sprint’s One-Up program. The program was an answer to T-Mobile JUMP, the early upgrade solution that offered users the ability to upgrade their phone after 6 months to a year of use. I say “was” because Sprint is no longer offering it, with the company announcing that One-Up has been retired as of January 9th.
The program consisted of customers who purchased an eligible smartphone with no down payment, depending on device, and agreed to 24 monthly installment payments for the device. After 12 consecutive installment payments, those customers are eligible to give back their current smartphone and upgrade to a new smartphone by entering into a new Installment Agreement.
The program also gave Sprint customers a $15 discount on their monthly service plan. Folks who were able to get in on the fun will be able to keep their discounted price for the time being, though Sprint will snatch it away with your next phone upgrade or if you decide to switch plans. So why are they doing this?
Because they believe the Framily plan is a better value for you and yours. The Framily program allows customers to get discounts on their phone service for each line of service on their account. Framily (friends and family) accounts with 7 or more members can get up to $35 off their monthly service, for example.
Framilies can consist of multiple accounts, meaning your 4-line account could potentially combine with your brother’s 3-line account to get to that fruitful 7-line discount, and every line still gets their own bill and services.
It’s worth noting that Sprint still does support annual upgrades with these new plans, though it doesn’t come with the benefit of discounted service. Here’s a line from their official FAQ about it:
I am a current Sprint customer and want to change my current plan to Sprint Framily Plan. I am upgrade eligible or am in an active Sprint One Up installment billing agreement.
The One Up customer will maintain the annual upgrade benefit afforded to them under the program (at no additional charge per month) until the end of their current installment billing agreement provided they make their 12 consecutive Installment Agreement payments on time.
When the customer elects to take advantage of the annual upgrade, the customer must enter into a new Installment Agreement and giveback current phone under an Installment Agreement.
If they would like to keep the annual upgrade option, the customer will need to purchase the $20/month per line unlimited data with annual upgrades buy-up and make 12 consecutive payments to qualify for the next annual upgrade benefit.
It’s an unfortunate caveat of Sprint’s new vision for family plans. While Framily seems to be a great value for certain people, it isn’t quite as good as One-Up was for many more. Framily doesn’t seem to be quite as beneficial as One-Up until you hit that 5-7 line mark, which is a difficult mark to reach for many folks.
Unfortunately this is what Sprint feels is the best way to go moving forward, and we’ll likely see this plan stick around much longer than One-Up did. If you’re still not turned off by all this, be sure to stop into your local Sprint store or call and see about all the different options you have (though you could get a lot of the information you need by perusing Sprint’s official FAQ document).
Since you get separate bills this should be very easy to game. Someone simply needs to setup a website to make it easy to create framilies.
This is just a bad idea. Sure, you get separate bills, but I am sure Sprint will find a way to tie them together, otherwise what’s the whole point?
So if your brother doesn’t pay his bill, and gets cancelled YOU LOSE YOUR DISCOUNT. And if you don’t have enough people to make the 7 line discount? You get matched up with a random guy from Iowa or Florida in order to get a discount. And then that same random guy decides to change carriers – YOU LOSE YOUR DISCOUNT.
How would this ever make sense?
You don’t get 8 people together, you get 800 together. That way you don’t need to worry about people leaving or joining. That is how it makes sense.
If you can’t find 6 family members + friends that pay their bills and are willing to get a great deal with you, I guess this isn’t for you.
One down two to go
They should have left the old Nextel towers up, that way people would get a speedier alternative to their 3G using the iDEN network for data.
For the people that jump on this is going going to make it worse. You get what you pay for though!
As far as I know, that wouldn’t have been possible, or even recommended. iDen itself is nearly a 2 decade old technology, and Sprint has had it ever since the acquisition of Nextel almost a decade ago. Not to mention that, I don’t think you could just use any old 3G phone on the iDen network, since it was built specifically for PTT. They would have to convert it, which is exactly what they did/are doing.
Wow. Misnaming at it’s best?
What was wrong with “group plan”? “Plans with friends”?
Friends + Family…
Uh…. yeah. Got that.
Thanks?
Sprint is just throwing random ideas against the wall hoping for one to stick. Instead of focusing on their infrastructure and bandwidth, they are inventing gimmicky new plans to lure unsuspecting customers into 2 year contracts. Most of their new plans are just rehashed versions of the same old plans. Some are less expensive by a couple of dollars, some are more expensive. I was once a SERO customer and raved to everyone about Sprint and the money I was saving. After they killed off SERO and canceled the Gold Member Benefits, they became my last choice for a cellular provider.
Actually they are rolling out LTE as fast as they can. The problem is that its an entire cell site replacement, so a lot more involved than other LTE rollouts.
They have LTE much more broadly rolled out than Tmobile…
http://sensorly.com/map/4G/US/USA/Sprint/lte_310sprint
Yeah great. I now have LTE right outside my office building and no longer have any signal inside the building. That’s real fun when it’s 11 degrees out.
Could they have possibly found a more stereotypical looking hipster for that ad? I say no they could not.
Dumbass plans. Just confusion to sound competitive to the comp, who also have dumb plans as well with this upgrade thing. When we had gold and silver th as when when you could upgrade yearly without the hassle.
Framily – awkward name. Sprint deserves the bashing they get and the LTE rollout has been brutal but I’m in a mostly completed LTE market and am pretty pleased with performance given that it’s unlimited. Was also traveling over holidays in a rural area of Florida. Sprint LTE worked (over 6Mbps) and since I didn’t have access to cable/broadband, I used over 30GB on Sprint over two weeks (watched a lot of Netflix on phone connected to TV). That would be expensive on ATT/VZW.
They should be in good shape after rollout is complete but a rough ride for them during transition.
Please don’t buy T-Mobile! Sprint already screwed up their own company. Don’t screw up the only major customer focused wireless company left in the U.S.
I really doubt they would even attempt to pull that off. If anything it would be the other way around. Softbank buying Tmobile then making Tmobile control Sprint. If they owned both then why not?
I wonder if Sprint will come up with a frenemies plan too.
That’s the AT&T plan.
AT&T would offer that plan for a higher fee and less data and force you to upgrade to the plan.
“I’m on the New Sprint framily plan dude.” “you mean family right?” “Nope. it’s framily.” “that’s stupid.” every conversation that Sprint users with that plan will have at some point.
Let’s see how long their supposed unlimited data forever lasts. These guys come up with new plans more than they come out with new customers.
Sprint is current guaranteeing that if you buy an unlimited data plan, you’ll always be able to keep unlimited data as long as you stay with Sprint. So it’s a good time to get unlimited.
Provided you get good data service with Sprint where you go which unfortunately is not the case for most people
This is bullshit. I talked to a sprint rep before the ninth and he said it was better for me and my wife to stay on our one up plan. He said this plan is pretty much for new customers. If you are already on sprint there is an extra charge for doing it. Been with sprint for like 10 years. They making it hard to stay
Add this to the reasons that I hope like hell Softbank/Sprint is not allowed to buy T-Mobile.
Basically its a lose lose situation for Sprint. Its tough to compete with T-Mobile but the lesser of the two awful options for sprint would be just to ignore T-Mobile. When you are simultaneously offering subsidized phones and non subsidized phones to existing customers, you stand risk of turning off existing customers and creating a lot more confusion. Either way Sprint is going to lose customers.
This plan doesn’t seem to bad really, just the network needs help in general. The only thing that’s not clear is the annual upgrade and what your paying for phones. It states you have to turn in your old phone to get a new one, which could be a huge “gotcha” depending on how its done.
I can’t tell if they are subsidizing phones or not or if there’s an option to own your phone at a heavily subsidized price. I don’t know if I’m making myself clear but basically I’m saying would I have have to “rent” a phone for 200-300, and they expect you to turn it in so they can resale it or say you can buy it at full original inflated MSRP.
But otherwise it’s a nice way to get a discount. Month to month style “contract” and everyone is responsible for their own bill, so no one can leave you high and dry by bailing so there’s no risk of joining random “framilies”. I think it was 45 a month for unlimited everything or 35 for 3GB, which is pretty reasonable. If t hey decided to kill unlimited you could switch your 3gb account over when needed and hopefully get grandfathered.
I’ve been a sprint customer for 12 years and I’m really on the fence about going with this or leaving ship.
For one, they don’t even have this plan figured out yet. I went into the store and the store MANAGER, told me that if I initiated a “framily” plan, that I could not add my mother in law onto it, ( she has 3 lines, plus my 2 that’s already 5) because she’s already a sprint customer. I pointed out the part of the brochure ( that he handed me) where it said that this plan is included for existing customers and he said that’s not the case, you have to add people that are not already sprint customers that have to port their number over.
I asked him to point that out to me in the brochure and of couse he could not.
I then called Customer Service who apologized for what he told me and then stated that I could link up to other existing customers. I then asked for clarification on the extra $15 a month and if it would be applied to either one of my lines, ( one of my lines the contract is up, the other isn’t up till may of 2015) and he said that it would not, but I don’t believe him since it contradicts what is written on the website.
If everything pans out and it’s a smooth transition, then I will be staying on with sprint, Their network is decent in my area, ( Tampa Bay) and paying less than $40 a month will keep me from straying to T-Mobile or Metro…
Sprint lost me for T-Mobile, for sure. I switched, and I’m LOVING it.
The sub-par speeds, even on LTE, in the Jacksonville… Tallahassee… even Kansas City areas was extremely annoying to deal with in day-to-day use.
Have some new place you found on yelp, no idea how to get there, and need Maps navigation to get there?
With sprint:
-Better plan to fight with time-outs and a decent 2-5 minute wait time to get those directions downloaded!
With T-Mobile:
-Search, download and go within the minute.
hi. i switched my sprint billing to this new thing called “framily” its like friends and family, but its totally separate billing. so for everybody that joins sprint with my id the bill for EACH LINE goes down by $5 (all the way down to $25 each) but you and I have our own plan and billing. I already have two lines on my plan so thats an instant $10 off a line. if you want to switch carriers and use my id code for free, check it out. THANKS! we will never share billing, i have my bill, you have your bill. You get unlimited data for $20 more. you can take my framily ID into a store M00103869lh or call customer service.