FreedomPop Will Take On Carriers By Offering Smartphones And Freemium Phone Plan

Free*<p>There's a $2 fee if you come close to your bandwidth cap (where they automatically 'helpfully' add value so you don't run out) and a $.99 fee if you don't use enough data (at least 5 MB a month). They'll probably have new and exciting secret fees when they roll this out.<p>I very much dislike the redefinition of the words 'free' and 'unlimited' among telecom providers, and we as a community should not support this. They're asking me for a credit card number to signup, <i>ipso facto</i>, it isn't free.

I want freedompop to succeed, but I have trouble seeing their vision in a world without lightsquared. A lot of us in the Telecom industry had high hopes for low-orbit satellite but it wasn't meant to be.<p>Even though Freedompop has had to go to market without the crazy low lightsquared pricing, they found an ally in Clearwire who has nothing but excess capacity. Ergo, freedompop gets a data rate they can resell at high margin.<p>I want them to win but VoIP over 3G is hard. Very curious about what infrastructure they're using to do the VoIP calls and whether there's going to be a proper switch in the core.

There has to be a trick here. I mean I understand a business model based in most customers consuming additional services (like the $10 voice plan), but I'd just go around with my pockets full of SIM cards for the iPad.

I'm not expecting it to be free but FreedomPop's latest 3G/4G hotspot is quite a good deal if you want a mobile hotspot around but you don't really need to use it often.<p>For $3.99/mo you get 500MB on the Sprint 3G/4G network and an additional $3.49/mo lets you roll over up to 500MB of unused data each month the thing is just sitting there unused. Yes 4G coverage is minimal nationwide, and I'd choose Verizon over Sprint given the choice, but for probably under $100/year my kids now have all the internet access they need for car trips. Additional GB are $20 if you use up what you've accumulated.

Little by little, prepaid and per use phone plans are becoming more popular. I'm surprised it's taken this long, but eventually people will catch on and realize they don't need to pay $100/month for a smartphone plan.

Just be sure to uncheck the option to tell your address book about them:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5827251" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5827251</a>

I've been using VOIP for most of my calls for over a year (using Google Voice through the iOS app Talkatone). It is flat out unusable over 3G, the latency is just too high.

Something to note: FreedomPop's coverage (based on WiMax) is fairly spotty, even in the SF Bay Area, which can be very frustrating.