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October 01, 2013

FreedomPop Phone: Completely Free Mobile Phone Service

There are no free lunches, no free rides. We're all familiar with those old saws, and even those who purport to be offering a free lunch or a free ride or anything else are quickly revealed as being not that free at all. But in the case of FreedomPop—which just celebrated its one-year anniversary—there may well be a free lunch after all in the form of FreedomPop Phone's new plan, which actually offers a free mobile phone service.

The FreedomPop service, which it bills as the “first 100 percent free mobile phone service” around, works essentially like a freemium model, or a free-to-play game might online. Basic service is available at no charge, while more robust plans with more features are offered for a fee. Though what it offers for free really isn't much of a slouch; users get 500 text messages, 200 anytime minutes a month, and 500 megabytes of data at no charge at all, or as the company puts it, “free every month for life.” Going to $10.99 a month, meanwhile, ratchets things up to unlimited voice and unlimited texting, a move that can save over $1,000 a year, according to FreedomPop's comparisons to other carriers offering similar plans.

FreedomPop, right now, only offers one phone for use with this program, though it's not a half-bad phone in all honesty, in the form of the HTC Evo Design. FreedomPop does, however, plan to bring more phone types into play—mostly Android devices at last report—and hopes one day to support a model that lets users bring in a phone for use on this model.

FreedomPop got its start back in 2012 with the 4G Sleeve, a device that allowed users to hook an iPod Touch into 4G services and get what amounted to “an iPhone-like experience without signing contracts or paying monthly fees,” which the company offered for $99. This was then followed up with the Hub Burst, a device that offered a gigabyte of free data every month, or 10 gigabytes for $8.99 a month, though the device itself cost $89. It then rolled out the Overdrive Pro in April, which offered a 500 megabyte per month 4G/3G hotspot and in August the company brought out the FreedomSpot 5580 hotspot, along with support for Sprint's LTE network.

This is deeply shaking up the mobile market as a whole, with the voice over LTE (VoLTE) market reaching 3.6 million subscribers in 2012, with the total number set to clear one billion by the end of 2013, according to word from Infonetics Research. But with Infonetics Research also reportedly noting that the average income a business saw per user of VoLTE was just $7.13 a year, there were certainly issues to emerge.

Granted, an industry worth $7.13 billion a year isn't exactly a small industry, but providers need to have a pretty substantial chunk of that market and need to be able to provide the service profitably in order to survive as businesses. Some are turning to various partnerships and side ventures to better ensure profitability, and hopefully this will do the job.

Still, services like this will probably find plenty of interested users, especially among those who don't use mobile phones very often or treat said devices more like emergency tools than like complete communications packages. Only time will truly tell just how far FreedomPop can go with this concept, but it's likely to do pretty well, especially in a shaky economy.




Edited by Alisen Downey


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