There’s a new MVNO, mobile virtual network operator, on the North American scene and they’re called US Mobile, a product of online smartphone reseller, GSM Nation. US Mobile was beta launched a month ago across on the Yale Campus providing service to Yale, Harvard and Vanderbilt Universities but now the service has gone live across the country, offering coverage for up to 230m Americans via the T-Mobile USA network. GSM Nation were originally to launch a network in 2012 but their plans were delayed by other MVNOs wanting to sell handsets and SIM cards on their behalf. GSM Nation’s founder and Chief Executive Officer reports that Solavei, Simple Mobile, RedPocket Mobile helped GSM Nation increase their annual sales five times to $100 million.
It appears that the relationships with the MVNOs has quietened down but Ahmed is sanguine about the prospects. “We learned a lot from our MVNO partners,” he said. GSM Nation’s original plan for their own MVNO was to offer their own network for ‘phone buyers who hadn’t selected a carrier, which evolved into a focus on the middling to high data usage customers looking for a discount on the larger network plans. However, having watched several MVNOs tackling this market, Ahmed has switched the focus. Now US Mobile is aimed at the lower end of the market; those customers wishing to reduce costs and get their bill under $25 a month. This makes great business sense: sometimes the sensible game is not to play the way your competitors do. To this end, US Mobile’s plan is contract free and customers select how many minutes, texts and how much data they want from a matrix, which is used to construct their plan. You can top up online or on your ‘phone and they’re offering inexpensive rates to call overseas. Minute bundles vary from 100 to 2,000 a month, text messages from 100 to unlimited and data ranges up to 2 GB a month.
I’m sure that many of our readers have heard about or even used GSM Nation. If you had a good experience with GSM Nation, would it encourage you to try US Mobile, especially if you have already tried T-Mobile USA or a MSNO that uses T-Mobile? Hit us up and let us know in the comments.