This morning, Sprint announced a new add-on for the Framily Plan for those that travel internationally, as well as those that call and text others in other countries. International Connect: Call & Text is $15/month and it lets Framily plan subscribers use their allotment of calls and texts internationally. Which is good if you have family outside of the US that you call or text frequently. With this add-on Sprint Framily plans can make calls to 65 countries, and text to more than 180 countries. To break it down, here’s what counts against your Framily plan allotment:
Calls to landline numbers in 65 countries, Calls to mobile numbers in 35 countries, “Low” per-minute calls to mobile numbers rates in the 30 landline countries not included in the mobile, “Low” per-minute calls to numbers not included in any of those 65 countries, Unlimited texts to “over 180 countries”
Sprint has been struggling as of late, in fact they posted a $151 million loss for the first quarter of this year, as well as losing a handful of customers. Meanwhile, their Framily plan has become pretty popular. The carrier was touting during their earnings last week that they now have over 3 million subscribers on Framily plans. Now that’s out of their 54 million subscribers on their network. Sprint has been advertising the Framily plan pretty heavily, and it appears that users are gravitating towards it. It sounds like a great plan, as long as you understand what exactly it is. Which I think Sprint is doing a better job at explaining it now, than when it first launched.
International calling and texting is a great start, but international usage is still a mess. Hopefully the carriers can work to clean that up soon. As it’d be nice not to have to worry about roaming while traveling. And I’m sure I’m not alone here.