The Reason Verizon Is Surprising Some Subscribers With A Free Phone

It's not usual for large profit-oriented corporations to dole out millions of dollars to serve the interests of their consumers. But that seems to be precisely what U.S telecom carrier Verizon is up to these days. Verizon recently confirmed that it will send free phones to a select group of consumers still stuck with the company's CDMA-based 3G network.

As you may have figured, the new free phones that Verizon intends to ship to its consumers are newer, entry-level flip devices that aren't particularly costly or feature-filled. Nevertheless, there is no denying that this exercise will indeed cost Verizon a significant amount of money, given that it will be shipping out thousands of these phones. On Verizon's FAQ page that explains the reasons for doing what they're doing, Verizon also reveals some of the handsets these consumers can expect to receive starting the next few weeks.

In 2016 Verizon began a public effort to decommission its old CDMA-based 3G network in favor of newer 4G LTE networks. Verizon's original plan was to decommission this archaic network by the end of 2019. When that did not happen, the CDMA network received a fresh lease of life until 2020. However, after the pandemic hit, Verizon decided to give its old network one last run. As of now, the company plans to really, truly decommission this network by the end of 2022 completely.

However, before they do that, the company needs to figure out how to help thousands of its existing CDMA consumers who are still hooked to the old network. Previous efforts from the company seemed to have done little to encourage these users to use newer 4G and 5G capable handsets. Verizon's fix to this problem is to send many of these consumers a free 4G phone so that they can shut down the CDMA network by the end of the year without having to worry about anyone losing access to their network.

The devices Verizon intends to ship to these consumers are the Orbic Journey V, the TCL FLIP Pro, and the Nokia 2720 V Flip. All three devices are 4G capable flip phones running proprietary operating system software that shouldn't cause too much fuss in the network's population of old-school holdouts. Because most of the existing CDMA users are on older flip phones, it would make the transition to these newer phones much more straightforward.

If you happen to be among the list of consumers eligible for a free 4G phone from Verizon, you will receive official communication from the company. For more questions surrounding this exercise, you might want to visit this dedicated FAQ page.