T-Mobile and Sprint made headlines in late April after announcing that the new companies were merging together as "The New T-Mobile", and as a direct response to that, U.S. MVNO FreedomPop is launching a new company called UNREAL Mobile.
Where FreedomPop is meant to compete with the likes of Cricket Wireless, Boost Mobile, and other pre-paid MVNOs, UNREAL Mobile will be marketed as a proper alternative to post-paid plans offered by T-Mobile, Sprint, etc.
Commenting on the announcement, FreedomPop Senior Vice President of Strategy and Carrier Relations, Mauricio Sastre, said —
A year ago, there was no way Sprint would have allowed us to offer UNREAL. 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.
UNREAL Mobile will use Sprint's 4G LTE network for coverage and unlimited plans are said to start out at just $15/month. The exact details of that plan are still unclear, but with UNREAL Mobile's CEO, Samantha Lewe, noting that "more than half of Americans use less than the nationwide average of 1.6GB of data per month", it'll likely come with a small amount of 4G LTE data while the rest of your "unlimited" bucket is limited to slower, 3G speeds. When specifics on this are made available, we'll let you know.
Along with the traditional offering of unlimited talk, text, and data, UNREAL Mobile will also offer its customers a VPN, built-in encryption, mobile-ad blocking, and the ability to use your number on a variety of devices (such as tablets, computers, etc.).
UNREAL Mobile will be launching in early summer of this year and you can get early access via a beta.
