Wireless In a Box

Back in the day, when the whole telecom industry was rollicking and everybody wanted a piece, Telcordia — the company formerly known as Bellcore, the R&D arm of the companies formerly known as Bells — marketed versions of its operations and business support software as “Jumpstart.” It was a “CLEC-in-a-box” concept: With Telcordia's software expertise and a good business plan (or, in retrospect, any old business plan), interested parties could find success as competitive local exchange carriers.

A similar phenomenon is now taking hold in the wireless sector, albeit with better overall strategies on the carrier side. Visage Mobile, the subject of this month's cover story, is pioneering the concept of the mobile virtual network enabler, or MVNE. The subject of their “enablement,” of course, is that new breed of wireless service providers known as mobile virtual network operators, or MVNOs. The core ideas behind the MVNE's empowerment of the MVNOs are that the brand's the thing that's most recognizable to mass-market consumers, that purveyors of popular brands want to sell wireless without having to invest in the network infrastructure or back office gobbledygook to do so, and that extant wireless network operators will do anything to bring in more revenue on the networks they spent so much capital to create.

The whole MVNO/MVNE thing is a concept that, on cursory examination, might seem antithetical to wireless service providers. After all, the whole idea is that wireless carriers should let companies like Visage plug into their networks and siphon off mobile minutes. When combined with Visage-supplied back office expertise, those minutes would then be re-branded as something like Mercedes Mobile or Wal-Mart Wireless and sold to consumers who would never know (unless they did a little digging, or read Wireless Review) that their wireless service actually was carried over the network of AT&T Wireless, Verizon Wireless or Sprint PCS. In other words, the carriers that worked so hard to build expensive networks would actually be unbundling them and allowing other entities to make money off of them.

Clearly, however, the wireless carriers that embrace the MVNO model (so far, count only Sprint PCS and Nextel Communications among them, though intelligence reports indicate that many more operator/brand deals are about to be sealed) are smart enough to know that different brands appeal to different consumer segments, that no wireless service provider can be all things to all potential customers, and — most important — that a busy, bustling network is a network that generates more revenue for the carrier that owns it.

And go figure: The mobile carriers that decide to participate in this new brand of wireless service marketing are doing so voluntarily, with no indecipherable deregulation acts or legalese-laden FCC orders dictating how they do it or how they price it. There's definitely a competitive lesson in there for us all.