FreedomPop announced it’s spinning out a new MVNO brand, dubbed Unreal Mobile, to offer unlimited plans starting at $15 per month — and company executives are not being shy about using competition concerns surrounding the proposed Sprint-T-Mobile merger to their own advantage.
“A year ago, there was no way Sprint would have allowed us to offer UNREAL,” said Mauricio Sastre, FreedomPop SVP of strategy and carrier relations, in a statement. “Today however, their hands are tied, as Sprint and T-Mobile are held up in regulatory approvals contingent on their ability to demonstrate that competition won’t suffer. Given that FreedomPop’s platform is enabling large companies like Dish to launch new MVNO brands in months, we decided to use it for our own purposes.”
FreedomPop teamed up with Dish in 2016 to bring its model of free talk, text and data to customers in Mexico.
Now the company is seeking to leverage the T-Mobile-Sprint situation, as the carriers wait for regulatory approval from multiple agencies for their proposed $26.5 billion deal. The two have argued the combination will allow them to compete with rivals Verizon and AT&T, but also with new wireless entrants like Comcast.
“Unreal Mobile is able to provide consumers this unprecedented value because of the market conditions created by the proposed merger,” FreedomPop said in its release. “Specifically, while Sprint and T-Mobile are currently working to prove to regulators that competition will flourish under consolidation, they are compelled to accept MVNO models and pricing that historically would have been seen as too competitive to their retail businesses.”
FreedomPop said Unreal Mobile will launch in early summer of this year, and is currently singing up a limited set of beta customers.
“With many experts predicting a rise in prices as the market consolidates, we knew it was time to offer the American public a full service, lowest-price alternative that delivers the same great features but guarantees pricing no matter what happens in the rest of the market,” Samantha Lewe, Unreal Mobile CEO, said.
