Sprint today revealed a new plan that extends the concept of family plans to non-relatives.
With the Sprint Framily Plan, customers can decide who they consider family, the carrier said at CES. New and existing customers can add up to 10 phone lines to one account, with each person getting a separate bill.
The more people who join a Framily Plan, the higher the savings. One line is $55 per month for unlimited talk, text, and 1GB of data. That goes down by $5 per month for each person who joins, for a maximum monthly discount of $30 per line. With a group of at least seven people, everyone gets unlimited talk, text, and 1GB of data for $25 per month per line.
For $20 per month per line, Framily members can buy up to unlimited data and get a new phone every year. The Framily plan will be available starting Jan. 10 online and in stores.
There doesn't appear to be any restrictions on who you can add to your "framily"; Sprint's announcement mentions your yoga teacher, barista, fantasy football team, and parents on your son's soccer team. "A group of family, friends and others you can now call 'framily,'" Sprint said.
Really, it's a move to get new customers. Current customers can move to a Framily plan and then invite people to join their account. But existing Sprint accounts cannot be combined into one Framily plan unless both accounts are owned by the same person.
Exiting customers who are on a plan with a discounted phone, meanwhile, will have to pay an extra $15 per month per line until their line is upgrade eligible. But for a limited time, Sprint will waive the $15 per month to move to the Sprint Framily Plan for customers who purchased a discounted phone before Jan. 10 and are not upgrade eligible.
To accommodate these and other customers, Sprint is now rolling out its Sprint Spark LTE upgrade plan in Dallas, Austin, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, as well as Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
In October, Sprint unveiled an ambitious plan to more than double the wireless broadband speed on its 4G-LTE Sprint Spark network in the United States by the end of 2014, while also increasing coverage and capacity significantly. The Sprint Spark network is now up and running in 11 markets, including Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and Tampa.
Sprint started selling the first tri-band-capable smartphones for its Sprint Spark network on Nov. 8: the LG G2, Samsung Galaxy Mega, and Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini. The HTC One Max and Netgear Zing Mobile Hotspot were added later.
This week, Sprint added a few more devices to its Spark lineup: the curved LG G Flex (pictured), the Nexus 5 , and the Netgear LTE Gateway 6100D.