FreedomPop Offers Free 500MB of LTE per month, upgrades to Sprint's LTE Network

FreedomPop is crazy with its wireless offerings. You buy a wireless hotspot or USB dongle, and you get 500MB of free data each month with no contract, activation or cancellation fees. FreedomPop's network was kind of crappy at first, running on Sprint's WiMAX's network, but the carrier has moved up to Sprint's LTE network.

LTE service will start off at first with a single device, the $150 FreedomSpot 5580, a Novatel Wireless dongle also known as the Sprint MiFi 500 LTE which lasts up to 10 hours on a charge. FreedomPop claims users will see average speeds of 6 to 8 megabits per second, and peak speeds of up to 25Mbps on the new network.

Zact: The Reinvented Wireless Carrier

Imagine a wireless carrier that allowed you to build your own plan. Zact, an upstart service provider created by Andreessen Horowitz-backed ItsOn that uses Sprint’s network, has an amazing breakthrough on wireless.

Zact has all no contract plans, so there is no commitment. Just a simple plan, 500 minutes, 1,000 texts, and 1 GB of data will cost just short of $40. At the end of the month, Zact's billing style is much different than that of traditional cell providers. Regular carriers, such as AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint, will charge you for what you paid for, and will send you no notification that you should downgrade or upgrade your plan. Zact automatically goes and looks back at your usage for the past month. It will only charge you for the nearest plan that fits your usage; no extra charges for data/texts/call minutes you didn't use. This is a different business model for cell carriers, actually try and charge the customer as little as possible.

There is only one catch though: Zact only has two Android smartphones (three if you count a color change), and then only one with LTE. None of them are very pretty though. Ting is a slightly more attractive Sprint MVNO, but only because it offers more devices. I am definitely going to be keeping my eye on Zact, they are really onto something.