Boost Mobile - History

History

Boost Mobile was founded in Australia and New Zealand in 2000 by Peter Adderton, who brought it to the United States in 2001 as a joint venture with Nextel Communications. Using Nextel's iDEN network, Boost offered an unlimited push-to-talk service marketed as only costing a dollar a day, at a time when cellphone plans offering unlimited talk were still rare. Its service was primarily marketed towards urban minorities—its advertising used urban slang, and the service was initially exclusive to markets in areas such as California and Nevada.

Boost's United States operation was acquired outright by Nextel in 2003, who began to expand the brand elsewhere in the United States in late 2004. Sprint Corporation would acquire Nextel in 2006, leaving Boost Mobile as a subsidiary of the merged company. Boost would still use the previous Nextel iDEN infrastructure for its service, but in 2006, it began to offer a new Unlimited by Boost Mobile service in select markets using Sprint's CDMA network, offering unlimited talk, text, and internet. While the plans resulted in significant growth for Boost, Boost would not begin shifting to CDMA entirely.

To compete unlimited offerings from competitors in the wireless industry, Boost Mobile announced on January 15, 2009 that it would launch its Monthly Unlimited Plan. The plan was accompanied by re-focusing the brand towards a broader demographic than before. The new unlimited plan resulted in a net gain of more than 674,000 customers in about three months. Despite this lift, Nextel overall suffered a gross subscriber loss of 1.25 million contract subscriptions.

The unexpected surge in popularity for the service caused significant strain on the Nextel iDEN network—as many customers reported long and sometimes week-long delays in receiving text messages. A Boost Mobile spokesman said that they did not anticipate the level of popularity for the new service, and that efforts to improve the network had been implemented to help mitigate the problem.

At the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show, Boost announced it would begin to offer a new unlimited plan using Sprint's CDMA network, costing only $50 a month. For $10 more, Boost also offered an unlimited plan for the BlackBerry Curve 8830. Sprint would also acquire fellow prepaid wireless provider Virgin Mobile USA in 2010—both Boost and Virgin Mobile would be re-organized into a new group within Sprint, encompassing the two brands and other no-contract phone services offered by the company.

On June 20, 2010, Boost Mobile launched the Motorola i1 phone, the first iDEN-based push-to-talk Android phone.

On October 14, 2010, Boost Mobile introduced new "Shrinkage" plans, whose monthly prices fall by $5 for every six months of on-time payments. On April 5, 2011, Boost Mobile announced the Samsung Galaxy Prevail, the company's first CDMA-based Android offering.

In June 2012, Boost debuted a new television campaign to promote its first smartphone using Sprint's WiMAX 4G network, the HTC EVO Design 4G. The ads feature comedian Faizon Love as the "4Genie", a genie who magically appears where cellphone users seek low-cost 4G. On June 27, 2012, Boost Mobile announced it would release the BlackBerry Curve 9310 on July 10, for only $100 outright, along with a new "BBM Unlimited" plan offering unlimited talk, text, and BlackBerry Messenger starting at $45 a month.