Sprint Nextel’s Boost Mobile will add its fourth...
Sprint Nextel’s Boost Mobile will add its fourth LTE-equipped smartphone this year, launching LG’s Optimus F7 on Thursday without a contract at $299. The Android 4.1-based Optimus F7 has a 4.7-inch LCD, 1.5 GHz processor and eight-megapixel camera. It adds…
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to Boost’s lineup of LTE-based models as Sprint sharpens the focus of its prepaid business on smartphones, which accounted for 75 percent of that segment’s Q1 sales, Sprint executives have said. Boost previously offered 4G WiMAX models, the last of which was introduced on Clearwire’s network 18 months ago, a Sprint spokeswoman said Thursday. The push in prepaid comes as Sprint continues to expand its Network Vision LTE rollout, having 13,500 cell sites at the end of Q1 and a goal of reaching most of the 38,000 it has plans for by year-end. Sprint’s LTE service is in 110 U.S. markets, up from 88 in March. Sprint remains on schedule to shut down Nextel’s former network by June 30, having only a “small amount” of subscribers remaining on it, the spokeswoman said. Sprint had 1.3 million subscribers on the Nextel network in March, having converted 264,000 to its postpaid service in Q1, the company has said. Boost, which targets customers focused on voice and text services, and Virgin Mobile, which is targeted for data, had 15.68 million customers March 31, up from 14.96 million a year earlier, Sprint has said. The prepaid business had a decline in average revenue per user to $26.08 from $26.82 a year ago, while monthly churn dropped to 3.26 percent from 3.62 percent, the company has said. Prepaid revenue improved to $1.22 billion in Q1 from $1.2 billion a year earlier, Sprint has said. Sprint remains poised to introduce BlackBerry’s keyboard-equipped Q10 this summer, the company spokeswoman said Thursday, declining comment on the exact date. Sprint was among the few U.S. carriers that didn’t offer BlackBerry’s touch-based Z10 when it was introduced earlier this year.