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Could ethnic MVNOs become successful with quad play ?

September 29, 2006

A new MVNO was launched in the US yesterday: Red Pocket Mobile. It targets 4 million well-educated and wealthy Chinese-Americans in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The service is based on Motorola Razr phones with menus and content in Chinese. International calls to Taiwan, China and Singapore will be charged the same as domestic calls and subscribers can choose their own local Chinese numbers.

Another ethnic MVNO will be launched by E-Plus in Germany in mid October: it is called “Ay Yildiz” (moon star, the name of the Turkish national flag) and is targeting the 2.6 million Turks living in Germany.

If MVNOs like these are successful, a natural next step will be to broaden the range of services aimed at the same communities with TV, radio, web, content, etc. Is the ethnic approach a way to build profitable quad play services?

-Erik




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Comments to Could ethnic MVNOs become successful with quad play ?

  1. RE: Could ethnic MVNOs become successful with quad play ?
    Neeraj :
    July 18, 2007 6:14 AM

    Ethnic approach can certainly be a good idea in markets where a huge community base is present. Most TV broadcasters use this approach and have been quite successful at it too. Apar from the example of Germany which Erik quoted above, India can well be another such case where a huge customer base exists and which can be divided into distinct, separately targetable communities.
    However, thorough research should be taken up before using this option in geographies like UK where a good mix of communities exist and to a large extent they are homogenous in their preferences of content.

  1. RE: Could ethnic MVNOs become successful with quad play ?
    Martijn Brouns :
    September 6, 2007 6:35 AM

    I think a cross media ethnic service bundle is great. It perfectly fits the requirement for quad players to tailor services to smaller pockets in the subscriber base (contrary to one-size fits all services).

    Questions of course is this: will it be a quad player that owns the network, an MVNO-like quad player that has (virtual) access to all channels or is it a combined effort?

    Most quad players today believe they can offer superior services by combining differentiated services with customer intel, derived from the network (i.e. service usage, location, device in use, etc).