Boost Mobile is continuing its bid for your business with a new round of announcements about its network, its performance, and its phone lineup.
The first point this service—once known as one of Sprint’s prepaid brands—makes: its 5G network "now covers more than 70% of the US population, with coverage across 99% of the country via roaming partners," meaning AT&T and T-Mobile.
Boost doesn't specify how much more than 70% (a threshold Boost reached in June 2023 as required by its agreement with the FCC); we reached out for comment. But in September, Boost said it would cover 80% of the US population by the end of the year.
Boost has been building this 5G-only network since 2020, when government regulators required Sprint to spin off Boost and sell wireless spectrum to Dish Network as conditions of T-Mobile buying Sprint that year.
Monday’s news from Boost includes a commitment to invest more than $10 billion into the network buildout. The carrier has faced a lot of skepticism about its ability to finance this effort, but DirecTV’s planned acquisition of Dish Network from it and Boost’s corporate parent EchoStar—if approved by regulators—would take almost $12 billion of debt off EchoStar’s books and leave it much better positioned for what's left of those costs.
The carrier is already pitching its 5G as faster than AT&T and Verizon’s, although the Ookla study it cites as evidence found that T-Mobile’s 5G, as tested on its Metro by T-Mobile prepaid service, is faster still. Boost’s fastest downloads, up to 1Gbps, come on phones such as Samsung’s Galaxy S24 that support four-channel carrier aggregation, in which the network ties multiple 5G channels together to maximize throughput.
Boost also touts much cheaper plans than the unlimited-data offerings of the big three carriers, but the $25-and-up offerings it introduced in July come with a caveat that we should have called out then: After you exhaust the “premium data” allocation, speeds are throttled to 512kbps.
Dish’s $25 “Unlimited” plan includes 30GB of premium data but doesn’t allow mobile hotspot use; Unlimited+, $50, comes with 40GB of premium data, all available for hotspot; Unlimited Premium, $60, provides 50GB of premium data, also all hotspot-eligible. All of these prices factor in a $5 auto-pay discount, and those for Unlimited+ and Unlimited Premium fold in taxes.
Boost today also announced a new and very low-priced phone exclusive to its service, the $94.99 Summit 5G. For customers who switch to Boost and port over their phone number, the phone will be free. The Summit includes a 6.6-inch display, 13MP and 2MP back cameras and a 5MP front camera, 64GB of onboard storage with the option to add more via a microSD card, a 5,000 mAh battery and a MediaTek 6835 processor—the same chip as in other budget phones like Samsung’s Galaxy A15.
This phone will ship with last year’s Android 14, not the just-released Android 15. There’s no mention of this phone supporting four-channel carrier aggregation, but given the low, low price we’re going to assume that your minimal expenditure won’t get you 1Gbps downloads.
Editors' note: We updated the story to clarify that Boost expects its total network-buildout costs to exceed $10 billion.