Sprint takes on rivals AT&T and Verizon with "Cut Your Bill in Half" scheme

Sprint Corporation, US telecommunications holding company and a global provider of wireless broadband services, last week announced its "Cut Your Bill in Half " scheme for the US market, which would allow Verizon and AT&T subscribers to switch to Sprint for a plan with unlimited talk and text and the same data plan at half the cost they were currently paying.

Further Sprint also offered to reimburse up to $350 per line for early termination fees or installment plan balances. The company was also waiving the standard activation fee of $36 as well.

Sprint was also trying to make the process as simple as possible to understand for most people, but given the manner in which mobile was bought and sold in the US, that was not so easy to do, Forbes reported. To help people make the switch, Sprint was asking people to first upload their current bill. Users would need to first download a PDF from you're their site and then be patient. (Alternatively, users could bring a bill into a Sprint store.)

In theory the process worked for most people and not only for T-Mobile subscribers.

Once Sprint is given the bill, it determines users' monthly recurring charges, what they paid for the shared pool of data used by their phones and tablets plus the line charges for each phone they had and halved the total. But that was where the deal got complicated. Users needed to first bear in mind that those per-line charges typically included a hidden fee to help cover the cost of the discounted phone one was likely using.

While AT&T and Verizon each started at $40 per month, Sprint would readily reduce it to $20. However that was not the deal it seemed. The reason was that to get Sprint's offer, one needed to buy a new phone using one of the company's installment plans. With those plans, Sprint typically only charged $15 per month if one had a family plan with 10GB of data or more included. Users would actually be a bit worse off taking this deal than just pretending it did not exist. Also it they had an installment plan with Verizon or AT&T (Edge or Next), those fees would not be halved, users would need to ''close out'' that portion of their deal.

While, T-Mobile would likely fall short of Sprint subscriber count in 2014, the goal set by CEO John Legere, if the overall dynamics don't change the telco, would likely overtake Sprint soon, The Motley Fool reported.

According to research firm Strategy Analytics, Sprint currently counts 54.7 million subscribers while T-Mobile has 52.9 million-strong subscriber base. However, the third calendar quarter saw T-Mobile add 2.3 million subscribers, as against Sprint's addition of a meagre 48,000 subscribers, mostly as a result of wholesale and affiliate subscribers.

Meanwhile, according to commentators, Sprint chief Marcelo Claure seemed determined to follow in Legere's strategy of aggressively attacking rivals with large, splashy promotions.  However, the company's latest offering, touted as a deal, does not quite bear that out going by the numbers.