Last week, AT&T's acquisition of Leap's Cricket of Wireless, left millions of customers to question what is going to happen to them. The FCC required AT&T to follow their guidelines and there is process in place to insure Cricket prepaid wireless service customers will have continued service and keep their phone numbers.
At the Aio website Cricket customers are assured that they can keep their phone numbers and will not have to make changes to payments. However, Cricket customers can't go into Aio stores for service, yet, until notified.
Cricket has about 4.6 million customers on its CDMA network, while the AT&T network is GSM. AT&T will shut down Cricket's CDMA network and Cricket will be AT&T's main wireless prepaid brand. The network shutdown will take 12-18 months.
Cricket customers will be able to keep their plans at the same price until they have to upgrade to an AT&T smartphone in a year or so. Feature phone plans will cost $40 a month with unlimited talk and text with 500MB of data. In current Cricket markets Aio will also offer one unlimited voice/text plan for less than $40 a month.
The recently launched Aio service will be folded into Cricket with pricing on par with present plans $40 a month for talk/text and 500MB of data or $50 a month for 2.5GB of data or $60 a month for 5GB of data.
It's not clear what's going to happen with Cricket's free Muve music service.
Cricket iPhone 4S/5/5S/5C owners will be able to get an AT&T SIM card and use their existing phones. Most Cricket phones won't work with the AT&T network. AT&T will offer a free feature phone exchange program while smartphone owners will get significant credits towards new smartphones.
Cricket customers will get the added advantage of not having to pay roaming charges when traveling across the United States.
AT&T will build out more LTE using Cricket's unused spectrum. As part of the deal AT&T has to sell AWS-1 spectrum in some areas of the country.
Leap's Cricket spectrum overs 96 million people across 35 U.S. states while 4G LTE network covers 21 million people. AT&T also gets PCS and AWS bandwidth that covers 137 million people.
The FCC warned that the deal "has the potential to cause some competitive and other public interest harms in several local markets, as well as to value-conscious consumers."
CEO Jennifer Van Buskirk explains the deal in the video below: