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[pRICE cUBE]

Winston wrote:
[quote=pRICE cUBE]
From what I can gather, you need a GSM phone since it is run off the Sprint Network, I think.

No, you'd need a CDMA iPhone 5.

Sprint and Verizon are traditionally CDMA, not GSM, carriers. GSM originally used a different technology, TDMA. Until fairly recently Sprint and Verizon phones did not/could not use a SIM card, except for a couple of "international" models that had a GSM phone built in as well for use abroad.

This has changed two ways:

1. LTE (which is a CDMA technology) has been adopted by all the carriers, although not necessarily on the same frequency bands. LTE is now part of the GSM standard.

2. Expensive smartphones like current iPhones contain both older CDMA and older GSM radios, as well as LTE, so a single phone can be made and sold for use on any carrier.

A GSM iPhone 5, even though it's LTE, will likely not work with Sprint. If it worked at all, it could only work where there is an LTE signal - it would be unable to drop down to, for example, a 3G or 2G CDMA signal in an area that does not have LTE. And, again, it only has one of the LTE bands needed for Sprint. There may also be an issue that LTE is only used for data, and voice goes over older CDMA. In which case a GSM iPhone 5 likely would not work at all on Sprint.

(A further wrinkle about the iPhone 5: early GSM models, from AT&T, lacked a frequency that T-Mobile was using for a different 4G system from LTE. When T-Mobile finally got iPhones, Apple started adding that frequency to the phone. So some older, originally AT&T, iPhone 5 models won't work as well on T-Mobile, even though T-Mo has now set up a lot of LTE towers. The other 4G system shows up on a T-Mobile phone as "4G" instead of "LTE", but can be just as fast, or faster, than LTE.)

Good luck.

- Winston

Thanks for clearing that up. I saw Sim card and assumed it meant GSM.

[Winston]

pRICE cUBE wrote:
Thanks for clearing that up. I saw Sim card and assumed it meant GSM.

I can see the confusion. The newer phones that can do both traditional GSM and CDMA have to use (or offer the option for) SIM cards for the GSM part. I don't know if this effectively means that eventually all Verizon and Sprint phones will use SIM cards, since LTE is now part of the GSM standard. Probably they will, as it's needed for international travel, and they won't want to be left out of that, especially if AT&T and T-Mobile offer international on all their phones. Also, the radio chip sets available will probably offer it as a default. But then again, Verizon and Sprint went on for years with phones that mostly did not work abroad, and I understand most cellphones actually contain an FM radio as part of the chip set, but makers rarely enable it.

[space-time]

Bill in NC wrote:
It's great for data & presumably text (I didn't text when using FP).

For voice, well, voice calls are over VOIP & I've never been happy with that on FP or any other MVNO.

Apparently the calls are not VOIP according to the post at Slick Deals

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[Winston]

The confusion on VoIP may be via Clearwire, which used WiMax. Sprint had a tiny number of WiMax compatible phones after it bought Clearwire, but then decided to shut down WiMax and just use LTE. I don't know what voice protocol Clearwire used.

[Bill in NC]

Standard FP free plan probably still uses VOIP for voice.

Still my advice is to test this "premium" plan extensively before using it for your primary phone.