Now here’s a wild deal: The new Boost Celero5G, a $279 5G smartphone, comes with a year of free service—a $600 value. The Celero could be considered Dish’s first phone as it moves to become the fourth US nationwide wireless carrier, a destiny it charted as part of a government deal when T-Mobile purchased Sprint.
Boost is a prepaid wireless brand, not actually a carrier in its own right. Formerly part of Sprint, Boost was sold to Dish when T-Mobile bought its parent company. The idea was that Boost’s subscriber base would help seed Dish’s business as Dish built and then grew its network into a major new competitor. The company nabbed a seven-year deal with T-Mobile to run on the larger carrier’s network while Dish built its own.
But for the past year, things have been rocky at Boost. The company has been losing subscribers every quarter as it rejiggers its business to make money running on someone else’s network. Dish and T-Mobile have also been at loggerheads over getting subscribers off Sprint’s 25-year-old 3G network, which T-Mobile wants to shut down. Dish went and made a separate deal with AT&T to host some Boost customers on what the company now calls its “Expanded Data Network.”
Three months before T-Mobile says it will shut down the 3G network, “millions” of 3G customers remain, according to Stephen Stokols, EVP at Boost Mobile, and the whole mess has become a multifacted legal disaster, with Dish turning to California’s public utlity commission and the federal Department of Justice to keep the 3G lights on.
“We got big migrations, and the first million were the easiest, the next million were a little harder, and now you’ve got people who are just hard to get in touch with, and they’re the hardest to get over [to 4G],” Stokols says.
Hence, in part, the really aggressive pre-order promotion, which sweetens the pot for existing users and new ones. The new phone costs $279, but a pre-order between now and Oct. 31 comes with 12 months of Boost’s otherwise-$50 unlimited plan, which would be worth $600.
The phone will be available at retail “later this fall,” the company says.
Boost Takes Control
Boost didn’t give me a full spec sheet for the Celero. The phone uses a MediaTek chipset, Stokols says, and it has a 6.52-inch screen, “four cameras,” a 4,000mAh battery, 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of storage.
The Celero is key to Boost retaking control of its destiny, Stokols says. Caught between the collapse of LG Mobile (a major Boost supplier) and the chipset shortage, Boost hasn’t been able to get enough phones to supply its customers. “It’s been tough to get enough devices to meet demand,” he says. “Over half of [Boost’s] phones were coming from LG. Coupled with the chip shortage, we haven’t been able to meet organic demand.”
The phones it does get, meanwhile, may not support Dish’s unusual new network bands, such as n70, which other carriers don’t use. The first batch of Celero devices work on T-Mobile’s network, but future batches will also work on AT&T’s and Dish’s networks, Stokols says. Other n70-compatible devices will also appear next year.
Dish hasn’t launched a network yet, but the government requires it to cover 20% of the US population with its own network by June 2022, a company rep on the call reminded me.
By ordering its own phone (Stokols wouldn’t name the supplier), “it gives us a lot more leverage,” he says. “We can control the quantities more because it’s us ordering them in big volumes; you’re not beholden to an OEM who’s serving multiple masters.”
Custom phones such as the Celero5G will let Boost slide its customers between T-Mobile, AT&T, and Dish’s networks, although that’s going to be a long process.
“For three to five years, [we are] probably having all three networks,” Stokols says. “Then in eight to nine years, they’ll be all on our network. [Before then] the plan is not to get off T-Mobile altogether; they’ve got a good network.”
We’ll have a full review of the Celero when it comes out later this fall.
