InPhonic becomes AT&T's wireless enabler

As AT&T gets back into the wireless game as a mobile virtual network operator, a fellow MVNO, InPhonic, will grease the skids with its e-commerce platform.

Washington, DC-based InPhonic is a multi-faceted company that provides online distribution and activation of wireless services and devices through private label Web sites. Also, through its Liberty Wireless brand, InPhonic itself is an MVNO. The company is taking the e-commerce platform it built for providing billing, customer relationship management, provisioning, fulfillment, subscriber management and customer care to Liberty Wireless, and licensing it to other would-be MVNOs--allowing InPhonic to also become a mobile virtual network enabler (MVNE).

AT&T is the first to announce an MVNE relationship with InPhonic, but founder and CEO David Steinberg said his company has a number of deals in the pipeline.

“We are simply taking a platform that has already put hundreds of thousands of subscribers on the network and we are leveraging it,” Steinberg said.

AT&T signed a two-year contract with InPhonic for its back-end platform to provide procurement, activation, billing and customer care and will use InPhonic's mobile data platform for over-the-air activation, mobile web and advanced wireless messaging.

“We think it speaks volumes to our MVNE capabilities that AT&T would have hired us to build this platform for them. AT&T is possibly the largest potential MNVO coming in to the country,” Steinberg said.

InPhonic’s Liberty Wireless division is one of the fourth largest MVNOs in the country behind Virgin Mobile, Boost and Qwest. While enabling AT&T could droop it to fifth, Steinberg said the two companies do not compete because Liberty Wireless is primarily a pre-paid service and AT&T’s will be much broader and focused on the enterprise.

He sees a lot of potential for extending the company’s enablement platform to the MVNE market. InPhonic established a new division of the company six month ago to focus on it.

“Frank Bennett, the former chief operating officer of the entire company, has been reassigned and promoted to president of our MVNO services group, so we are taking this business very seriously,” Steinberg said.

InPhonic works closely with Sprint, which will provide the network piece of the AT&T solution, but sees opportunity to work with several operators. “I don’t think people want to be married to one carrier in the long run and that’s why a carrier like AT&T would choose to use us instead of going directly to Sprint for MVNE services,” Steinberg said.