Wireless for Infant Set
You’ve got to love a good, creative April Fool’s joke. Mark Lowenstein, who runs Mobile Ecosystem in Boston, sent out an e-mail today about a new MVNO service called Babble aimed at the 10 million children in the U.S. under the age of two. He describes an exciting feature called “Free Middle of the Nights” where all incoming and outgoing calls are free between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. It’s quite funny.
While Lowenstein is having some fun, he does put the spotlight on the MVNO market. In Canada, Virgin Mobile has been in business for a month through its joint venture with Bell Canada. Andrew Black, who heads up Virgin Canada, recently said subscriber growth is ahead of plan but we may not get a real sense of how well Virgin is doing until BCE Inc. (Bell’s parent) releases its quarterly results – assuming it breaks out the JV. It is hard to tell how well Virgin is doing in Canada. It’s advertising seems somewhat un-Canadian in that it is edgy, cheeky and sometimes off-color. I hope it is resonating with the teen-set because they don’t do much for me. Then again, I’m a long, long way from the target audience. Virgin’s biggest impact could be if it re-ignites the pre-paid market, which has been ignored in Canada as wireless carriers focus on post-paid customers and ARPU.
