Overhauling Virgin: Monthly prepaid plans out the window?

Virgin Mobile. What follows is pure speculation, but hey, that’s the fun part about these acquisitions. It looks certain that Virgin will adopt a postpaid tier once the Helio acquisition passes through the necessary approval steps. The question for us prepaid kids is what this means for their current lineup of prepaid plans. I’m not quite sure they’ll hang onto all of those plans, and then have a series of postpaid plans on top of it. It kind of sounds like, gasp, Amp’d Mobile. So what will Virgin do to avoid that beaten path? This pundit’s speculation: They’ll cut their monthly prepaid plans. The important thing when having two tiers of service is to make sure users don’t conflate them. One way Virgin can deal with this is to move all the flat-rate plans to a postpaid tier, while keeping their per-minute plans on prepaid. That would continue to serve the prepaid demographic, since they’d still have a true pay-as-you-go. The only plan I can see winding up with both prepaid and postpaid is the unlimited plan. It makes sense on prepaid because of competitors like Cricket, MetroPCS, and Boost Unlimited. This would allow them to keep in competition with those services, especially since it is available in a larger area than any of them. They could also finagle this on the postpaid end, possible offering a discount for signing a two-year contract. This is only my opinion, though. Clearly, Virgin has an executive team looking at the situation and figuring out how to best delineate the services. Which would you prefer? I know reader Melissa E has Virgin. Would Virgin customers be disappointed if they moved all the monthly rate plans to postpaid, and left the prepaid mostly on a pay-per-minute basis?]]>