Friday, July 31, 2009

Price War Breaking Out in Prepaid Wireless

MetroPCS Communications is making another potentially disruptive move in the prepaid wireless market, introducing a prepaid $40 a month unlimted plan including voice, texting and Internet access.

The $45 plan now include sunlimited email, navigation and social networking applications. MetroPCS’ $30 and $35 local unlimited plans will now include caller ID and call waiting.

The $50 plan continues to offer smartphone customers complete HTML Web browsing and enterprise wireless email.

For anybody who doubted potentially huge changes in the prepaid market, this is yet another example.

MetroPCS was the first North American wireless carrier to offer unlimited international long distance calling for an additional $5 per month, to over 100 countries and over 1,000 destinations. This unlimited international long distance feature is available on both the $45 and $50 service plans.

MetroPCS is also offering consumers a family plan. With MetroPCS’ family plan, families with two to five lines will be able to enjoy MetroPCS Unlimited Nationwide service for talk, text and Web access for $35 per line.

TracFone Wireless, the nation's largest prepaid wireless service, recently introduced a $45 flat-rate monthly plan for calling and text messaging. That undercut the previous $50 benchmark for unlimited monthly plans set by Sprint's Boost Mobile prepaid service earlier this year. The pressure is now on Boost, and Virgin Mobile, to match its rivals by dropping pricing below the $50 level.

The other big change will be a breakthrough in phone models available to prepaid customers, particularly the higher-end smart phones. Historically, low phone cost has been something of a requirement for budget-oriented customers, but that will change as the customer base begins to reflect the same demographics as the postpaid base.

1 comment:

zxt said...

Those are really good pricing. I'm using T-mobile prepaid and I wonder what will their and other prepaid carriers reaction to this. Hopefully they will react and lower their pricing too.

I don't care for international calls because I got Onesuite.com which has very good rates to countries I'm calling.

Let's see how the market reacts to MetroPcs.

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