Sprint Brings Back 50 Percent Off 'Switch' Campaign As It Festers In Last Place

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before. Sprint is making another move to persuade customers from competing wireless carriers to hop over to its last place network, and it’s doing so by offering to cut their bills in half. Yep, this is the exact same deal that Sprint offered around this time last year, and it didn’t seem to work so well for the company the first time around. Yet here we are again.

The promotion, which begins November 20^th and lasts through January 7^th, is slightly different in one aspect. Last year, the promotion was only open to customers on AT&T or Verizon Wireless. This time around, Sprint is extending an olive branch to T-Mobile customers as well (T-Mobile this year bypassed Sprint to take third place in the U.S. wireless market).

Sprint promises to offer you a 50 percent price savings based on what you’re paying at your current wireless carrier, and will cover up to $650 in “switching costs” when you trade-in your current smartphone. This will cover paying off your smartphone with your current carrier and will be distributed in the form of a gift card. Sprint promises to honor the 50 percent rate cut until January 2018, so you have plenty of time to enjoy the the bargain basement pricing.

And of course, there are also plenty of gotchas involved depending on what carrier you’re coming from. The offer is only applicable to T-Mobile’s Simple Choice rate plans (2GB, 6GB, 10GB) -- it is not applicable to T-Mobile’s unlimited data plans. And once you blow past your monthly data allotment, you will be throttled from LTE to 2G speeds for the remainder of your billing cycle.

If you’re coming from AT&T (300MB, 2GB, 5GB, 15GB, 20GB and 25GB plans) or Verizon (1GB, 3GB, 6GB, 12GB, 18GB, 20GB and 25GB plans), however, you will be forced to pay 1.5 cents per megabyte once you go past your monthly data allotment. That’s right, there are those overage fees that T-Mobile CEO John Legere is always harping about. Needless to say, we have no idea why Sprint would decide to treat Verizon and AT&T customers differently than T-Mobile customers, but we’ve given up trying to explain the motives behind U.S. wireless carrier these days.

Oh, and speaking of John Legere, you knew that he would have something to say about this latest promotion from Sprint. And as usual, he didn’t disappoint:

Did we just witness beginning of the end for @sprint? $2.5B to cut, laying people off, now price cuts? The countdown clock makes sense now!

— John Legere (@JohnLegere) November 18, 2015