Virgin Mobile plans to follow Cricket, will offer pre-paid iPhone

Cricket won’t be the only U.S. carrier offering pre-paid iPhones for long, according to a news report that Virgin Mobile will also sell Apple’s smartphone on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Sprint, Virgin Mobile’s parent company, is expected to announce later this week that the carrier will begin offering the iPhone as early as July 1, according to the Wall Street Journal.

That news comes days after Cricket announced it would begin selling pre-paid iPhones starting June 22.

There are no details yet on pricing for Virgin Mobile’s iPhone, but Cricket will charge about $300 more than other networks do for iPhones that come with a two-year contract. Cricket’s iPhones will also cost about $150 less than what other unlocked iPhones cost.

There was also no word on how much the monthly charge for a Virgin Mobile iPhone could be although the carrier has a plan that costs $35 per month and offers data that gets throttled down after 2.5 GBs of usage.

Cricket will charge $55 per month for unlimited calls and texts on the iPhone as well as 2.3 GBs of data.

Sprint’s offering of the iPhone through Virgin Mobile could come as a result of the deal the company made with Apple to buy $15.5 million of iPhones in order to land the phone on its network, according to the Journal.

There was no word, though, on whether or not the iPhone could also be coming to Sprint’s other pre-paid carrier, Boost Mobile.

A Virgin Mobile iPhone would be available to more customers than a Cricket iPhone. Virgin Mobile is available in areas that cover nearly 280 million people; Cricket only covers about 60 million people.

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