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AT&T's Cricket Brand to Cut Off Lifeline Service

Jun 4, 2014, 12:39 PM by Eric M. Zeman

AT&T recently indicated via its support web site that it will eventually discontinue offering Lifelife service through its Cricket prepaid brand. Lifeline allows qualified Americans to receive free or heavily discounted wireless service through Cricket. AT&T will support Circket's current CDMA Lifeline customers for the next 18 months, but it will not sign any new customers to Lifeline service on its GSM network. The company explained, "Cricket is upgrading its CDMA network to 4G GSM and expects to stop offering CDMA wireless service as early as March 2015." Cricket spelled out in capital letters that CDMA phones - including those used by Lifeline customers - will no longer work after it completes the transition to GSM/LTE. "When you transition to the new Cricket GSM network and rate plan, you will not be able to keep your Lifeline credit," it said. AT&T said Cricket does offer plans as low as $25 per month, which are comparable to some of the Lifeline plans. AT&T didn't explain why it is discontinuing support for Lifeline.

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Comments

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rwalford79

Jun 4, 2014, 1:27 PM

Another reason mergers are bad

The FCC should have wrote this in as a stipulation that lifeline and poor customers who rely on service be migrated.

T Bone

Honestly, the Lifeline service is being very badly abused right now, it is supposed to be available only to the poorest of the poor, people who cannot afford phone service any other way, but often people sign up who aren't even poor at all, they never...
(continues)

...

insider.

Jun 5, 2014, 12:26 PM

There's no money in it!

Its interesting that they can cut it off at will. I wonder why cricket did not think of that? I wonder if any telecom really wants to provide the service??

CMCHUNK

Whats funny is that virgin mobile provides the "obamaphone" to welfare cases...and theyre owned by sprint

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dougm

Jun 6, 2014, 9:37 AM

No more Hotspot service either

The AT&T Cricket is no longer offering the Hotspot service which is pissing off lots of legacy Cricket customers. They also don't allow BridgePay (allows a user to extend his bill due date by paying $7).

Might as well just be a GoPhone customer. AT&T is alienating a lot of legacy Cricket customers.

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