This news came down the pike on Friday afternoon, but we’re only covering it now. Why? Because your trusty editor was enclosed in a metal tube, some 30,000 feet in the air, on his way home from the Prepaid Press Expo when it broke. After passing through the proper legal and regulatory bodies, the merger between Virgin Mobile and Helio is a done deal. As under the original terms of the deal, SK Telecom and EarthLink will receive “limited partnership units and shares equivalent to 13 million shares of Virgin Mobile USA stock.”

Virgin Mobile CEO Dan Schulman sums up the deal well:

“This acquisition of Helio also comes with a number of financial benefits, including improved network rates from Sprint for Virgin Mobile USA, and strategic investments by SK Telecom and Virgin Group which improve our capital structure and increase liquidity.”

Specifically, the deal with Sprint calls for an eight percent reduction in network rates in 2009. This helps in the sense that the margin between wholesale and retail — a forefront theme among MVNOs — has been reduced over the past few years. Any improvement on that for Virgin Mobile is a positive.

Virgin also gains 170,000 customers from the deal. I haven’t been able to find any comment on what will become of these contract customers, of whether they’ll be allowed to go free, or if they have to honor their Helio contracts. We’ll see if anything comes up about that in the next few days.

This post was taken from Prepaidreviews.com - a top source of information on prepaid cell phones and prepaid providers like Verizon INPulse, Cricket Wireless and more.