My take on Sprint's Simply Everything plan

By Mehdi

Earlier this week, Sprint introduced its Simply Everything plan. The plan gives you unlimited voice, data, text, email, Web-surfing, Sprint TV, Sprint Music, GPS Navigation, Direct Connect and Group Connect for $99.99 a month. Dan Hesse, Sprint's CEO and prez has called this "a bold, unprecedented move." Bold? Yes. Unprecedented? Yes. Good for you, Dan. Unfortunately your company's not too hot right now. But that's another story for another day. Let's keep our focus on the plan. AT&T and Verizon both offer unlimited voice for $99. T-Mobile took it a step higher with unlimited voice and text for the same price. And now, Sprint has knocked them all out with this. They deserve props. If you're on a family plan, each additional line gets a $5 discount ($99.99, $94.99, $89.99 and so on.) In my opinion, this plan is great for an individual line. But not so much for larger family plans like mine. There are 5 lines in my family plan. Lets add it up... and that adds up to $449.95 for 5 lines. That's a bit too much. Especially when not everyone's gonna use all of the unlimited features. So in that case I'm better off without it. If I was on an individual plan it would be a different story though.

There is also a dumbed down version of the Simply Everything plan for $89.99. This plan only includes unlimited voice, texting, and Direct Connect. So it's basically unlimited everything except the data. Kind of like T-Mobile's unlimited voice and texting plan. I'd take the 99.99 plan since unlimited data plans rock and considering Sprint has great 3G, if not the best in US. It would be worth the extra $10. Also, here's a chart that takes a look at different available plans including Simply Everything.   

Comments

[Matthew]

While Sprint may arguably have the largest 3G foot print, until AWS is finially released by the US Government. Sprint honestly needs to make offerings such as this to even have a hope of stopping the hemmoraging of customers leaving their service. Sprint's customer service is notoriously bad, to put it mildly. For me to even remotely consider Sprint as a viable option the price would need to be a heck of a lot better. I would also agree T-Mobile's family plan offering is horrible. 199.99 isn't a bad deal but let's be honest, most family plans users with a family of 4 will have 1 or 2 users that use a large portion of the pool; charging 99 per addition is unduly excessive. I could understand a premium over the typical 10 per line such as 20 but 99 is out of line, not to mention out of touch with their consumer base.
Rather than unlimited plans, I'd much prefer unlimited feature bundles. People could then pick the voice plan that suits them better and add the bundle that works for them. I hate the fact that we have a family plan that has pooled minutes but with the exception of SMS all other services are still sold on a per line basis. If voice plans be pooled, SMS, data and other add-ons can also.