Virgin Mobile in Minnesota

[TKH]

We live in a Twin Cities suburb and have been with Sprint for 10+ years, but only with old voice-only flip phones. I have one, and my husband has one. He needs to get texting and data for work, so we need to make the leap to smartphones. With a regular Sprint 2 year contract, it would be $155/month. With Virgin Mobile, we'd need to buy the phones outright but the total would be about $70 a month with no contract. Taking into account the cost of the phones, we'd still save $1,600 to $2,000 over the course of 2 years. I thought Virgin Mobile operated on the Sprint network, but when I called Virgin Mobile to ask if we'd be fine for coverage with them since we are fine with Sprint, the guy said they do not use the Sprint towers. Their map says we'd have good coverage, but the guy seemed to indicated that our coverage would somehow be less, either by area or outages. I'm not sure. He sure wasn't trying to sell me anything! If anyone can comment about their own experience with Virgin Mobile in MN, I'd appreciate it. We don't need anything much, we were otherwise happy with our flip phones! We'd get iPhones, because we are tied into the Apple network and understand them best. We aren't very 'technologically inclined'. We would like service if we go to Duluth, St. Cloud, Brainerd, Rochester, etc. Also some coverage around the US would be nice for vacations and such. I'm trying to figure out, aside from needing to buy the phone, why is Virgin Mobile so much cheaper than the big companies? Thanks.