Apparently, Sprint increased its “Administrative Fee” for all of its customers earlier this year. Raising the fee from $1.99 to $2.50. That’s a pretty substantial increase, and according to analysts, it could result in Sprint bringing in an extra $200 million in revenue each year. AT&T did something similar almost immediately after its trial to purchase Time Warner had wrapped up. However, AT&T’s Administrative Fee almost tripled.
The Administrative Fee is one of those fees that every single person is charged, no matter what your wireless carrier is. It’s a fee that carriers use to recoup the costs of allowing customers to roam on other carriers and such. While that’s the reasoning that many carriers provide, it is likely to also pay for keeping accounts up-to-date. It’s one of the many fees that wireless customers are charged each month, and most people just look at their bill and pay it. Many don’t look into seeing what they are being charged for, especially if it is only increasing by about $0.51 per month. That’s a small amount that won’t raise many eyebrows. Speaking of which, it’s unclear when Sprint started raising this fee, but many Sprint users on Reddit are reporting seeing it as early as April. So it looks like it did fly under the radar for quite some time.
In the past few years, Sprint has been looking at ways to cut costs on its services and such, in an effort to pay down some of its debt, and also bring in more customers and raise revenue. While this is going to be a pretty small increase in its revenue, in the grand scheme of things. This is still going to amount to around $200 million, when the increase is applied to its 30 million subscribers. That still may not be enough to put Sprint into the red, which the company has been having trouble staying out of lately.