
FreedomPop Will Take On Carriers By Offering Smartphones And Freemium Phone Plan - maerek
http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/05/freedompop-free-phone-plan/
======
gergles
Free*

There's a $2 fee if you come close to your bandwidth cap (where they
automatically 'helpfully' add value so you don't run out) and a $.99 fee if
you don't use enough data (at least 5 MB a month). They'll probably have new
and exciting secret fees when they roll this out.

I very much dislike the redefinition of the words 'free' and 'unlimited' among
telecom providers, and we as a community should not support this. They're
asking me for a credit card number to signup, _ipso facto_ , it isn't free.

~~~
kgermino
I use their free 4G service now.

Yes, there are 101 up-sells and add-ons that cost money. However, as long as
you use that 5MB minimum none of them are surprises. The '$2 fee' you speak of
is (as you implied) not so much a fee as 'recharging your prepaid card.' They
we're upfront about it and they make it easy to disable.

Everything else is a GoDaddy style up-sell. Annoying, but very easy to ignore.

Other than the initial purchase I haven't paid them a cent.

------
josh2600
I want freedompop to succeed, but I have trouble seeing their vision in a
world without lightsquared. A lot of us in the Telecom industry had high hopes
for low-orbit satellite but it wasn't meant to be.

Even though Freedompop has had to go to market without the crazy low
lightsquared pricing, they found an ally in Clearwire who has nothing but
excess capacity. Ergo, freedompop gets a data rate they can resell at high
margin.

I want them to win but VoIP over 3G is hard. Very curious about what
infrastructure they're using to do the VoIP calls and whether there's going to
be a proper switch in the core.

------
adlpz
There has to be a trick here. I mean I understand a business model based in
most customers consuming additional services (like the $10 voice plan), but
I'd just go around with my pockets full of SIM cards for the iPad.

~~~
joezydeco
I don't know if there's really a trick, just a business model counting on the
fact that people will go over their free allotment.

I have a FreedomPop Rocket Sleeve that I use with an iTouch, had it for about
a year now. I've never paid for more than the free 500MB bandwidth since I
only use it in the rare times I'm out of a Wifi zone. And I'm pretty
conservative with my data usage.

But FreedomPop is claiming 50% margin on their bandwidth, so I guess there are
a lot of people buying more data. They must feel confident that this will
carry on with the phones.

~~~
maxsilver
FreedomPop primarily uses Clearwire's WiMax network.

Wholesale bandwidth is significantly cheaper on Clearwire than regular cell
networks. (Clearwire gets an average revenue of $11 per user per month. Rumor
is that their wholesale agreement with Sprint is roughly $1 per GB, or $10 per
subscriber per month.)

If those numbers are true, then giving users 500mb free bandwidth might only
cost FreedomPop as low as 50 cents per month per user.

~~~
joezydeco
That makes sense. Considering that the "deposit" on the modem was $99 and the
BOM is probably 50% of that, the device itself probably paid for the first 3-4
years of service.

Ironically, I also have Clearwire data service at home and I'm paying $24/mo
for the exact same data (except it's uncapped and I'm using about 30GB/month).

------
OldSchool
I'm not expecting it to be free but FreedomPop's latest 3G/4G hotspot is quite
a good deal if you want a mobile hotspot around but you don't really need to
use it often.

For $3.99/mo you get 500MB on the Sprint 3G/4G network and an additional
$3.49/mo lets you roll over up to 500MB of unused data each month the thing is
just sitting there unused. Yes 4G coverage is minimal nationwide, and I'd
choose Verizon over Sprint given the choice, but for probably under $100/year
my kids now have all the internet access they need for car trips. Additional
GB are $20 if you use up what you've accumulated.

------
programminggeek
Little by little, prepaid and per use phone plans are becoming more popular.
I'm surprised it's taken this long, but eventually people will catch on and
realize they don't need to pay $100/month for a smartphone plan.

------
daimyoyo
Just be sure to uncheck the option to tell your address book about them:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5827251>

------
Camillo
I've been using VOIP for most of my calls for over a year (using Google Voice
through the iOS app Talkatone). It is flat out unusable over 3G, the latency
is just too high.

~~~
tirant
I use VoIP through the free app 'Line' and it seems to work quite well on 3.XG
lines. Voice Quality is also higher than normal calls.

------
argonaut
Something to note: FreedomPop's coverage (based on WiMax) is fairly spotty,
even in the SF Bay Area, which can be very frustrating.

