Sprint Pulls the Plug on Virgin Mobile

Sprint is officially pulling the plug on its decaying Virgin Mobile prepaid service and will transfer current customers to its Boost Mobile brand starting in February. From a report: The move doesn't come as a complete surprise as Sprint has long been pulling back marketing and distribution for the brand, most recently in October severing ties with Walmart as a distribution partner. Since then Virgin Mobile could only be purchased through an online portal, as Walmart was the last remaining brick-and-mortar sales channel, following earlier decisions in 2019 to pull the brand from Best Buy stores and Meijer. These moves were noticed by Jeffrey Moore at Wave7 Research, who previously predicted that Virgin Mobile was not long for this world. Back in November he told FierceWireless that it had been 31 months since Virgin Mobile had changed its rate card and the brand's press portal hadn't seen an update in 19 months.

Netcraft

[gregarican]

So has Netcraft confirmed this as well?

Speaking as a Boost Customer

[Cmdln Daco]

Speaking as a Boost customer, I am relieved to see Boost Mobile being referred to a something Sprint owns. Rumors have been flying that Boost would be transferred to Dish. Yikes.

Re:

[Bradac_55]

That's still on the table as part of the state's lawsuit.

One idea is for the "New T-Mobile" to sell Boost and Virgin Mobile plus some 600mhz spectrum to Dish to kick-start there push into the telco world they start a decade ago. Dish has been setting on some decent amounts of spectrum for awhile so getting into the pre-paid business using T-Mo and Verizon towers would make them a 4th baby telco that mirros how T-MO USA started.

Re:

[DewDude]

Boost has been owned by Sprint for years. You're still in danger of being transferred to another parent company as part of the merger conditions.

Happy Virgin Mobile Customer

[magusxxx]

I've had no issues with them for the 15+ years I've had their service. Hopefully this won't get screwed up.

Re:

[Snotnose]

Same here. Only problems I had were in the early days. They used to send mail every time my automatic payment went through. Something went wrong with my payment (got a new credit card, forgot to tell Virgin). A few days later a friend asked why I never answered my phone. Turned out my service had been disconnected. Fortunately the phone let me call Virgin's 1-800 number and I got the problem fixed. Shot them an email pointing out that sending an email every time a payment went through was kind of wor

Re:

[Iarwain Ben-adar]

You obviously never had to call them to solve a problem. A few months back, both my spouse and I were subject to sim-swapping attack, and it took hours of arguing on the phone to get service restored. I was without service for a week. As soon as I got my service restored, I switched carriers. Good riddance, I say.

Re:

[Snotnose]

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess expired credit cards are 90% of the issues, and SIM swapping is 0.001 of their issues.

" not long for this world"

[mrbester]

Yeah, if you're a typical parochial American idiot who doesn't believe there is another country on the planet.

Virgin Mobile is doing fine in UK (where it first came into being). Also in Australia, Colombia, Ireland, Canada, Chile, Russia, France, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Poland, South Africa and Mexico.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL go back to driving your diesel and telling us how great the Nokia N900 is.

Re:

[MightyYar]

Welcome to the USA! Enjoy one of our websites while you are here.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Virgin Mobile in the USA has been wholly owned by Sprint since 2009 [wikipedia.org]. It's not the same company as Virgin Mobile in other countries.

Re:

[GumphMaster]

Virgin Mobile has been on the chopping block for quite some time in Australia. To quote Virgin Mobile's FAQ:

On May 30 2018 we announced the that the Virgin Mobile brand will be phased out by early 2020. On June 15 2018, we ceased the sale of all Virgin Mobile postpaid mobile and mobile broadband plans.

The push was for burdens, aka customers, to move to Optus (which provided the cellular network Virgin Mobile sold anyway).

Re:

[chrish]

Virgin Mobile in Canada is just an "economy" brand for Bell since mid 2009.

it helped me through a rough patch

[jayrtfm]

During a period of unemployment I won a contest sponsored by the movie "Dirty Dancing II".
Never saw the movie but winning the phone and year of service kept me a customer until I got a work issued blackberry.

loved Virgin Mobile

[AdmNaismith]

I've had a $20 dumb phone and a dirt cheap plan with Virgin Mobile since about 2004. Had no complaints about any of the service (their customer service was the best). But their smart phone rate were too high for me, so I switched away from them after 15 yrs. Felt a little guilty about that. Looks like I needn't have worried. Farewell VM- you are missed.