Now that energy prices have skyrocketed, I’ve been considering how to reduce the large bill I get for mobile phone service. It’s a larger monthly payment than our water service, our Internet service, and our phone service combined. Some months it is even higher than our electrical bill. And for what? We’ve got upteen hundred minutes per month for which we use perhaps 300 at most. Personally, I use on average around 100 voice minutes a month. (Most of my billed minutes are packet minutes, a.k.a. “PCS Vision.” I pay an extra $15 per month for the privilege of running up my overall minutes to get tortoise-like Internet speeds on a crappy phone web browser.)
There’s clearly a lot of cheaper plans out there. I can live without the PCS Vision, perhaps returning to the WiFi connectivity reseller Boingo for my Internet fix. Focusing simply on voice then, the choices are many.
Yesterday I discovered MVNOs, a concept written up in last month’s Forbes. An MVNO is a Mobile Virtual Network Operator – a company which buys minutes wholesale from the major mobile phone services and resells them to its own customers. Virgin Mobile has caught my eye before with their prominent displays in Best Buy. Their plans would save me money and I wouldn’t be giving up any coverage as they use the same Sprint PCS network that I already use. I was just about to give them a try when I thought to look on the Internets to see what else was out there.
It turns out there is a lot! There are lists of MVNOs at MobileIn, and CNet, among others. It looks like a hot market as the list is obviously growing. At the moment, I’m considering Liberty Wireless or one of the other Sprint resellers. An initial look shows I could shave fifty bucks off my monthly mobile phone bill – money which could then go to more interesting and productive uses.
The MVNO market is a market to keep an eye on. It could finally bring some innovation to a stodgy, boring U.S. wireless market.