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Sprint iPhone 5 owners, welcome to Ting

And the iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C should gain support for the wireless service later this year.

Lance Whitney Contributing Writer
Lance Whitney is a freelance technology writer and trainer and a former IT professional. He's written for Time, CNET, PCMag, and several other publications. He's the author of two tech books--one on Windows and another on LinkedIn.
Lance Whitney
Ting now supports the iPhone 5.
Ting now supports the iPhone 5. CNET

Sprint subscribers who own an iPhone 5 can now bring their phones to Ting. OK, but what exactly is Ting, you may ask?

Launched in 2012, Ting is a mobile service that attemps to avoid the limitations and frustrations of the typical wireless plan. Ting offers various rates based on how many minutes, messages, and megabytes you use. But you don't actually pick a specific wireless plan. Instead, you just fall into a certain rate bucket depending on how much you consume each month.

As an MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) partner of Sprint, Ting allows you to bring certain phones to its network from Sprint. Until now, eligible devices included several Android phones and the iPhone 4 and 4S. But now you can add the iPhone 5 to the mix. Ting offers a full tutorial on how you can bring your iPhone to its service.

What about the newer iPhone 5S and 5C? Sprint keeps the newest devices for itself, at least for a while, so Ting is forced to wait until it can support them. But they're coming.

"The iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C hit the Sprint lineup in late September of 2013." Ting said in a blog post Tuesday. "So, we expect they'll be able to make the move to Ting at about the same time this year."