MVNOs gear up marketing

Amp’d Mobile announced its second distribution deal this week, extending its retail presence to 600 Circuit City stores in addition to its distribution deal with Best Buy and its own online sales portal.

The move adds to the flurry of activity among the new MVNOs after industry and financial analysts began questioning their business models this summer. Since then, however, Amp’d Mobile has launched its own TV advertising, bulking up its sales channels with big box retailers, and announced its first subscriber numbers. Though it only reported 50,000 subs, the virtual carrier anticipating intense growth the remaining months of the year as it revved up its marketing engine, projecting a subscriber base of more than 150,000 by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, prime time TV ads began appearing for Disney Mobile, which launched quietly this summer. As promised, Disney is billing itself as a trusted family carrier, rather than a mobile storefront for Disney content, playing up parent supervision services like its family member location tracker and spending allowance service.

Last quarter both Sprint and Verizon Wireless, the primary network providers for MVNOs, both saw significant dips in their wholesale subscriber bases, raising concerns over the performance of what was supposed to be one of the hottest sectors in telecom. While many industry analysts have already written off the MVNO as an unsustainable business model, others have said that initial slow growth was expected as MVNOs prepare to challenge the formidable marketing muscle of the Tier I carriers.

In other wireless news, Nokia today continued its trend of specially tailoring phones to the U.S. market, announcing a new thin clamshell multimedia phone designed to compete with Motorola’s RAZR and other ultra-thin handsets popular in North America. The N75 is the consumer compliment to Nokia’s E62 push e-mail device, which was created in consultation with Cingular to challenge Research in Motion’s dominance in the U.S. enterprise space. Nokia, however, is packing a lot more into its slim clamshell, supporting a full music player with 2 GB of expandable memory and 2 Megapixel still/video camera.

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