So my dear brother down in Knoxville, is all psyched up about ting.com a branded reseller for the Sprint network.  The beauty behind ting.com is that they charge you for ‘what you eat’, not some stupid package from AT&T / T-Mobile / Verizon that barelly starts at ~$50.

My brothers bill is about ~$23 a month with regular usage and that is with a Samsung Galaxy SII with full messaging, data and voice minutes (you use more, you pay a bit more). Ting has a sweet ‘plan’ calculator you can check out.

That being the case, I had an ‘older’ Samsung Epic 4G Nexus S (SPH-D700) phone:

So my issue came into play because I wanted to test drive Ting, and this phone had an old OS, so I googled for alternative ROMs that I could enable and found that CyanogenMod supports it (I was overjoyed & very happy to learn this fact).  The original phone supported only the 2.3.x Gingerbread OS, which is ancient at this point.

CyanogenMod Download files:
http://download.cyanogenmod.com/?device=epicmtd

Since I updated the OS to the latest Android Jellybean release (supported by cyanogenmod) I found myself unable to do a carrier wipe, PRL update, or Profile update. So I kept on googling and found this awesome multi-boot solution for stock ROMs (without having to wipe your phone or do anything else to it). The neat thing about it is that one can simply add it to their SD card and ClockWorkMod ‘install from zip’ which results in booting from that ROM (without an install!).

So once you boot into the stock FC09 firmware, you are able to go through all of Ting’s requirements for setting up the phone on their network.

Ting Supported Devices:
https://help.ting.com/entries/22567167-Bring-Your-Sprint-Device-to-Ting-A-List-of-All-Supported-Devices

Ting instructions for SPH-D700:
https://help.ting.com/entries/22535762-configuring-mms-and-wimax-on-your-epic-4g-sph-d700

In closing, I’ve had a really good learning experience with doing this type of modding for getting a Sprint ‘locked’ phone onto Ting.  It was a bit challenging but it is all worth it when you realize you just brought back to life a phone that was lying in the corner unused.