Sprint orders Liberty to stop bring your own device program
Liberty Wireless. They’ve gone through many changes over the past few years, and have irked many former customers. They’ve turned things around over the last few months, moving their plans more in line with industry standards. They recently began a bring your own device program, where they let users bring their Sprint network phones to their service. Unfortunately, it appears that Sprint does not like that idea, and has ordered Liberty to cease. The report comes from PhoneNews.com, who note that Liberty offered this program for two years, but were only told to cease once they started advertising the offer. This comes as a great disappointment. BYOD offers help consumers because they don’t need to buy a new phone. Liberty even added value to their offer, adding 200 minutes to a user’s account upon activation. From the PhoneNews.com report:
As part of a settlement in 2007, Sprint committed to allowing customers out-of-contract to take their devices with them to other CDMA carriers. Sprint also agreed to accept foreign CDMA devices from other carriers, but has failed to do so. It is not completely clear if Sprint’s shutdown of Liberty’s BYOD program is a violation of the 2007 settlement. Sprint owns the network behind Liberty Wireless, and can impose restrictions on what plans Sprint devices can be used on.And so ends another quality prepaid program. Oh well. Liberty still does have their free Motorola Q offer. ]]>
Not quite 100% over yet. It appears that byod is still possible if you email them at byod@libertywireless.com and give them info. BUT, it looks like 1)You have to get your own spc/msl number. 2)May be limited to Sprint mvno phones only.
In other words, it looks a lot like what Sprint allows Sprint mvno Platinum Tel to do. Sprint mvno phones as byod only.
No other Sprint mvnos besides these two have any type of byod far as I know. Sprint resellers Talkaway and Sun Mobile USA claim they do, but I seriously doubt it . If a major player like Liberty got laid low, I think minor resellers like Talkaway and Sun can’t really do it.
Sprint MVNO phones makes sense. Though I guess that doesn’t include Virgin Mobile any more.
Mike, the BYOD page on the web site, and email address are simply relics. You will get no success from using them… you will simply get an email saying that they have discontinued the program at Liberty.
Virgin Mobile has never activated Sprint phones, unlike Boost Mobile there is no backdoor to activate Sprint CDMA phones.
Or you can just forget about crappy CDMA networks and get a real phone (GSM). Of course Sprint is against this, thats the whole reason they picked CDMA, they want to own their customers and control them completely, just like Verizon. I’d rather have AIDS then be on a CDMA carrier.
THEY SAY THEY ARE UNLIMITED PLANS BUT THEY ARE NOT!!!! THERE IS A CAP ON THEM. THEY JUST FALSE ADVERTISE. MY DAUGHTER RAN OUT OF TEXTING HALFWAY THRU THE MONTH. JUST GOT THE RUN AROUND FROM THEM WHEN I CALLED. WORST COMPANY EVER!!!!