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Roccstar attends the DJ Drama listening party. Image Credits: Erik Voake for MNRK Music Group / Getty

Long-gone are the days when MVNOs can compete with the major telcos on price -- they have to bring something unique to the table, through tailored products that appeal to the hearts and minds of a specific audience.

Mint Mobile became online-only and went to great lengths to explain how it could pass these cost-savings to the customer. Ryan Reynolds' marketing acumen and gravitas was pivotal to Mint's rise.

"Despite Reynolds' popularity, it was a David vs. Goliath story -- everyone loves an underdog and they managed to get the message across that with the 'big guys,' you are overpaying for a service," Rasmussen said. "It's also a prime example of using 'existing assets' to sell much more than something boring like telephony -- they sold a lifestyle and a sense of 'I want to be part of this'."

In a similar vein, Grammy-nominated music producer Leon "Roccstar" Youngblood Jr. recently launched Roccstar Wireless atop T-Mobile, with the "backing of A-list celebrities" (these will apparently remain undisclosed for now).

Roccstar Wireless co-founder Darius Allen, who designed one of the first dual-screen smartphones, says that it's tapping Mint Mobile's "branding and experience" playbook to stand out in an increasingly crowded market.

"The success of Mint Mobile wasn’t solely due to its celebrity partners, but it was the marketing team's execution," Allen told TechCrunch. "Although we have taken a few pages from the success of Mint, we understand that it’s much bigger than slapping a few celebrities on a network to get users to change carriers. Mint was primarily an online company -- we already have more than 2,000 retail distribution partners and over 1,000 independent sales reps."

Numerous teams in Brazil's Série A soccer league have also launched their own-brand mobile networks, with very little difference between their respective plans -- Santos, Fluminese and Botafogo are almost exactly identical. All that matters is the brand.

Santos mobile phone plan. Image Credits: Santos FC

Fluminese mobile phone plan. Image Credits: FluMobile

Still, it's a winning play, with more teams keen to join the MVNO party. In Europe, Turkey's multi-sport club Fenerbahçe has operated Fenercell since 2009, and last year it was joined by Austrian top-tier soccer club Austria Wien and Italy's AC Milan, which rolled out AC Milan Connect at the end of October.

There's nothing stopping anyone from becoming an MVNO if they have enough of a fanbase, from sports teams to YouTubers. But while the process of becoming an MVNO has gotten easier, it is still fraught with challenges.

The enablers

Google has operated an MVNO for eight years, but it has the resources to negotiate partnerships and develop significant facets of the software stack in-house. Smaller entities might not have that luxury, which is where mobile virtual network enablers (MVNEs) really come into play.

MVNEs serve as the bridge between the MVNO and the carrier, taking care of the infrastructure such as SIM card provisioning, billing, user management, customer support, analytics and even front-end consumer-facing apps.

Humane, for example, is working with an MVNE partner called Optiva, which serves the telecom industry with full-stack business support systems such as billing and network integration, though Humane takes care of some things itself. "The front-end, and much of the custom functionality, is built ourselves to fully align with the Humane design and experience," Humane explained to TechCrunch.

Indeed, companies can decide how much of an "MVNO" they want to be, depending on budgets, goals and technical nous. There are so-called "thin" or "light" MVNOs, which are effectively resellers that rely on carriers' own resources. Some operators exist somewhere in the middle, with some of their own technology operating under the hood, before we arrive at MVNOs, which are fully fledged mobile networks sans mobile mast.

These full-stack MNVOs are becoming more common for various reasons, such as the availability of tools that give access to every element of the stack, such as deep packet inspection (DPI) that provides granular controls over permitted content. For instance, a kid-focused MVNO might want to enable parents to block access to TikTok after a certain time, or allow customers to access specific domains when they have no credit.

By way of example, Uber launched an MVNO in Mexico last year (it had operated one in Brazil since 2021), a move designed to address affordability among its vast driver base. With Uber Cel, the ride-hail giant makes it cheaper to access services that help the driver do their job, including unlimited use of the Uber app, Google Maps or Waze.

Zolve -- an Indian neobank that helps immigrants set up banking before they arrive in the U.S. -- entered the MVNO market last year too. Hurdles that immigrants face with banking are similar to those of getting a mobile phone plan, with weeks or months of red-tape, paper work and approval processes often delaying matters. 

"SIM Cards perfectly fit that story, as another essential service which immigrants need to settle faster and hence we deliver them in their home country," Prudhvi Varma, Zolve's head of marketing, explained to TechCrunch. "Otherwise, immigrants have to take temporary travel SIM cards or take international roaming services which are costly with limited validity before they get their own plans in the U.S."

Users can signup for their phone plan from anywhere in just a few minutes, with a choice of AT&T or T-Mobile.

Zolve mobile phone plan. Image Credits: Zolve

Initially, Zolve explored all the usual channels that budding-MVNOs go through. This included trying the "reseller" route, which involves partnering with an MNO to create own-brand SIM cards, with the carrier taking care of the underlying spadework. But this would have positioned Zolve more as a distribution channel for the carrier, plus it wouldn't give Zolve much control over the experience or access to any data.

"It was all a broken experience for customers as they have to visit Zolve to get a [SIM] activation code, create separate accounts with the telecom provider, and so on," Varma said. "For Zolve, it was difficult to track SIM activations, invoicing and such like."

So Zolve turned to Gigs to provide all the underlying infrastructure -- Gigs is basically an MVNO in a box, giving companies everything they need to offer telephony services natively, including checkouts, multicurrency payments and a single API that connects to multiple carriers. Gigs raised $20 million last year from notable backers, including Google's Gradient Ventures.

Behind the scenes, Gigs buys huge volumes of data, voice and SMS capacity from the telecom providers, collates their APIs into a single layer, and businesses can construct their own phone plans as required. The platform also offers customer and subscription-management smarts, with data presented in a single dashboard giving a full view of subscriptions, payments and analytics.

Gigs Dashboard. Image Credits: Gigs

This "plug and play" approach is why Gigs touts itself as a "Stripe for phone plans."

"When Stripe came along, everybody could put a payment button in front of anything in a matter of hours or days, and you could get a full integration of payments done with a team in a couple of weeks," Gigs CEO Hermann Frank told TechCrunch. "No need to talk to the banks or the acquirers, and no need to build everything from scratch while spending millions."

Gigs recently announced an AI product for MVNOs called Operator, designed to reduce customer support overhead by up to 95%.

The ChatGPT-powered service allows end-users to self-serve just about any request -- this includes UI elements to facilitate requests directly inside a chat. For instance, if a subscriber wants to update their credit card information, or if they need an eSIM for a new phone, Gigs will enable this there and then.

"We're able to do this because we're fully vertically integrated right into the network and into our own stack," Frank said.

Gigs Operator. Image Credits: Gigs

Recurring revenue

U.S. hardware startup Light also functions as an MVNO, with the minimalist phonemaker offering mobile plans for several years. But it was far from plain-sailing at first, having to use different platforms for different aspects of its network. Thus, Light quietly switched to Gigs a few months back.

"Even just from an admin perspective, we're now able to see everything about each user in the one dashboard, such as whether their card was declined," Light co-founder Joe Hollier told TechCrunch. "There's now so much more automation for things that were once manual -- every month we would (previously) manually email people whose cards had been declined!"

The minimalist Light phone also offers its own mobile plans. Image Credits: Light

While simplicity and affordability were among the motives behind Light's mobile plans, it also gives customers another way to support its mission -- to create a sustainable business off the back of a minimalist mobile phone.

"We do have a really strong and grassroots community, and so the additional revenue that we make off the service plan we invest back into our software development and so on," Hollier said. "Users are excited to pay versus any of these other carriers, and the revenue from the Light Plan has been a way for people to support us."

While Hollier said that the bulk of its revenue still comes from physical hardware sales, he hopes the balance might shift. Overhauling its MVNO infrastructure not only makes it easier on the internal administration side, it also improves user-facing features such as SIM card activation and onboarding.

"The easier it is to activate a SIM, the more likely someone's going to convert," Hollier said. "As the steps get more tedious, you lose people along the way. We suspect that we're going to see more activations."

As we've seen with Apple's increased reliance on services revenue, companies love steady subscription income. And this also could explain why Humane has ventured into MVNO territory -- generating revenue on hardware, no matter how fancy and futuristic, is difficult. It's rare for a company to scale the mountain of unit economics, making it risky to depend on that alone for a sustainable business. 

"The patents and licensing fees will eat up what little there might be left after producing the device," Rasmussen said. "A subscription-based model will not only keep the customers in the loop, but also provide a recurring revenue stream. In return, Humane will get the user data that comes with telephony, which they can use to better target the end-users needs and lifestyles. Humane will thus be in control of managing both the device and signal for current services and new opportunities, without having to pass through a mobile operator first."

Two Class 9 students from Assam, who recently failed in their unit test exams and fled their homes to catch a flight to Mumbai to become businessmen, were rescued on Thursday morning in a coordinated operation by the police forces of both states.

The boys were highly influenced by stories of global billionaire Elon Musk and wanted to become a successful rich person like him. So they decided to start a business using artificial intelligence (AI) after stumbling upon the idea in several viral videos on social media, one of the students’ families told The Indian Express.

Since the two were aware their families would not have approved of the idea, the duo decided to travel to Mumbai without informing them, the police officials said.

The Assam and Mumbai police took the two teens into their custody at the Mumbai airport on Thursday morning.

Earlier, the Mumbai police control room received information that two kids — a 15-year-old and a 14-year-old — from Tinsukia, Assam, had left for Mumbai on Wednesday without informing their families. The teenagers had boarded IndiGo flight 6E 115 to Mumbai.

The boys’ families had filed a missing persons’ complaint at the Doomdooma police station in Assam, following which the Assam police contacted their counterparts in Mumbai and sought help.

API Sandeep Shinde from the Sahar police station, airport staff, customs, and CISF officials reached the T2 terminal when the said flight landed early Thursday. The two kids were taken into safe custody and their family members, relatives and officials from Doomdooma police station were informed.

Hatched plan during vacation

The mother of the 15-year old, who is also a school teacher, said she suspected the two were in touch over mobile phone during the Christmas holidays.

“On Wednesday morning I saw that the safe in my wardrobe was opened and around 80,000 was missing. Initially I thought servants could be behind this, but later I discovered that the mobile phone she used to give to her son is also missing,” she said.

When she called on the number, he disconnected and later switched off the phone. She then called his school and was shocked when the teacher informed her he hadn’t gone to the school that day. His friend didn’t go to school either.

She got scared and started to look for the son and his friend in the area with her husband, relatives, friends and the other boy’s family. The family also approached the local police and filed a missing person’s complaint.

Hotel executive’s alertness and first lead

The family put appeals and messages on social media about the two teens and sought help as local media also made news of the two boys. Fortunately, an executive of the same hotel (60-kms away from their home) where the duo had stayed for sometime, identified the two in the news reports. He immediately contacted the police. The family of one of the boys also spoke to the hotel executive.

“He told us that they had left for the airport and also shared the cab driver’s contact. When we contacted the cab driver he told us that the boys were talking about plans to go to Mumbai via Kolkata. We now had an idea that they were heading to Mumbai. I used my friend’s help who is in customs, and we managed get the details of the passengers in two Mumbai bound flights from Dibrugarh airport. We finally got confirmation at around 11pm about the two boys on board IndiGo flight 6E115 to Mumbai,” said the uncle of the 15-year old.

The family through Assam police informed Mumbai police control room and API Sandeep Shinde and his team received the teens at the Mumbai airport. Had they left the Mumbai airport premises, we would have never found them again,” he added.

AI, investment business, Japan

The two were influenced by Elon Musk’s success stories, especially, the younger one, who had several business ideas and the elder one was looking after the funding part. The two had collaborated. There was also a third student in their group, but he didn’t turn up and said that he would join them later, the uncle said.

The two had been seeing videos of businesses using AI on social media, and out of curiosity, they hatched a plan to come to Mumbai for the business. They had plans to bring all youngsters who thought like them onto one platform and collaborate for a common business goal. Since their families would not have approved of their decision to start a business, they decided not to keep them in the loop. They bought air tickets using the cash, with one of them carrying his Aadhar card and boarded the flight on Wednesday afternoon,” the uncle told The Indian Express.

He added that both had failed in certain subjects in unit tests and were also scared of how the family would react, hence they decided to run away.

“With god’s grace I got my son back. We are still trying to figure out what trigged this,” said the mother of the15-year old. His family members said he was a little depressed because he failed and he thought is family would have been very upset.

“We will rope in professional counsellors to counsel the boys so that they don’t repeat this in future,” his uncle said.

“Following due process and after preliminary counselling, we handed over the kids to their parents,” said Sanjay Govilkar, senior Inspector of Sahar police station.

Thu, 04 Jan 2024 03:28:00 -0600 en text/html https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/mumbai/class-9-assam-students-rescued-after-hatching-plan-to-go-to-mumbai-start-business-9095671/