No, we’re still not going to see MetroPCS service in the Boston area until the first quarter of 2009. But that doesn’t mean they’re not hard at work on it. They’re working with NextG to lay the groundwork, according to Wicked Local Cambridge. This will include service in Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Medford, and other surrounding towns. It will be part of the company’s Northeast expansion, which has started in Philadelphia, and will further expand to New York City in 2009.

NextG plans to install equipment at 24 sites in Cambridge and should be completed by late September, Delsman said. The city had NextG install some equipment four months ago, before granting final approval, so residents could see the final product and have time to voice any concerns, he said.

The system includes underground fiber-optic cables and overhead antennas attached to existing utility poles belonging to NSTAR and Verizon on more than 30 Cambridge streets, according to plans filed with the city’s License Commission.

The city’s Pole and Conduit Commission has approved 18 NextG license petitions since March and authorized the company to “install manholes, lay, maintain and use conduits and make service connections, and extend wires therein for the transmission of telecommunications data over fiber-optic cable,” according to license commission records.

It’s no wonder why so few companies set up wireless networks. They’re a lot of work, and even more money. The spectrum itself cost Metro $313 million. I wonder how much more on top of that building the network will cost.

This post was taken from Prepaidreviews.com - a top source of information on prepaid cell phones and prepaid providers like Verizon INPulse, Cricket Wireless and more.

It looks like Net10 is looking to redefine themselves as a prepaid brand. First, we saw that they introduced an unlimited calling plan, undercutting the competition in both cost, $80 per month, and features, as they included unlimited text messaging. Now we’re hearing, via the trusty Ian, that they’re introducing two new plans, both on a yearly basis.

The first is a one-year card, which provides 2,000 minutes for $200. For many, this will not make a difference. It is the same rate as Net10 normally charges, 10 cents per minute. Further, it might burden some customers, as many don’t want to pay the full yearly price up front. But it does help those who can’t be bothered to re-up every 60 days.

The other plan makes a bit more sense. It’s $400 for two years of service. However, you get 5,000 minutes here, so it knocks calls down to 8 cents per minute, and texts down to 4 cents. So not only are you getting a great per-minute rate, but you’re also getting a beyond stellar price for two years of cell phone service.

Yes, this seems like a step towards contract service. In some ways, it can be considered worse. Instead of agreeing to pay monthly and then paying an early termination fee to get out of your contract, with Net10 you’re paying it all up front. No way to get out of that.

In the end, it depends on your needs. Net10 is just providing the options.

This post was taken from Prepaidreviews.com - a top source of information on prepaid cell phones and prepaid providers like Verizon INPulse, Cricket Wireless and more.

By now, most people are familiar with ringback tones. You know, the songs that play while you’re waiting for your buddy to pick up the phone. The biggest complaint about these is that they get old. Really fast. I had a friend who had “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” as her ringback tone for the better part of two years. That got a little annoying. With Virgin Mobile, you won’t run into this issue. They’ve just teamed with LiveWire Mobile to create ringback playlists. Now you can treat your friends to a rotating set of songs, rather than the same on over and over again.

Ringback playlists will feature 10 different genre channels, including hip-hop, pop, rock, alternative, television and movie classics, country, and more. The plan is to add more of these channels, presumably creating a large number of playlists. These ringback playlists can be further set to play on a certain day, time of day, or for a particular caller.

Wes Radez, director of mobile content, Virgin Mobile USA, said, “Adding this innovative feature is a natural extension of our very popular ringback service and gives our customers a way to automatically keep their playlists fresh and share their favorite artists and music with friends and family.”

The service, of course, is not free. It’s $3.49 per month, though that’s not the only charge you’ll incur. There’s an additional $1.49 fee for the ringback subscription. So all in all you’re looking at $5 per month for the privilege of allowing other people to hear music when they call you. If that’s your bag, then Virgin’s got the best solution out there.

This post was taken from Prepaidreviews.com - a top source of information on prepaid cell phones and prepaid providers like Verizon INPulse, Cricket Wireless and more.

Last week, J.D. Power and Associates released a semi-annual survey on the state of customer service in the wireless industry. While Verizon took home top honors, that’s not the main point of this. What caught my attention, and what surely was of note to those who leave comments on our reviews, is that wait time for customer service is up to 4.4 minutes on average. Yikes. That’s up 34 percent from last year, when the average was 3.3 minutes on hold. This cannot be good for the wireless industry’s spotty, to be kind, reputation regarding how they treat their customers.

What makes this figure more troubling is that about half of U.S. wireless subscribers had to contact customer service over the past year. That’s about 125 million customers, 75 percent of whom used the phone to call customer service — and wait their average of 4.4 minutes to talk to someone.

To me, if there truly was a high level of competition in the wireless space, companies would be getting better at customer service, as to attract a larger subscriber base. Instead, they’re regressing. What can we make of this? It’s tough to say. Many of the major carriers received scored fairly well. On the 110-point scale, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Alltel all ranked over 100, while AT&T sat at 97. Sprint, of course, brought down the bar, ranking at 79, where the lowest score could be 70.

Does this mean prepaid carriers are bringing the number down? Judging by our user comments, and search strings like this, yeah, that could be the case.

This post was taken from Prepaidreviews.com - a top source of information on prepaid cell phones and prepaid providers like Verizon INPulse, Cricket Wireless and more.

According to a study conducted a few months ago, simply having a cell phone can improve one’s earning power. Of course, so can having consistent Internet access. The overarching point is that the more connected you are, the more opportunities you’ll be open to. The Tennessee Department of Safety, in partnership with Tracfone, is taking a step in this direction. According to WSMV Nashville, they plan to hand out cell phones to 800,000 families. So not only is this good news, but it’s a hefty helping of good news.

The main idea of this — and it makes sense, coming from the Department of Safety — is to give these families unlimited access to 911 calls. MarketWatch lets us know that the exact number of recipients is 812,807, and that they will also receive 60 free minutes per month.

The program will last for one year, at which time families will need to resubmit their information to see if they qualify for another year. The hope, I suppose, is that many families can use the cell phone as an earning tool, and will not be eligible next year.

This post was taken from Prepaidreviews.com - a top source of information on prepaid cell phones and prepaid providers like Verizon INPulse, Cricket Wireless and more.

You might have seen this elsewhere over the past day or so. We covered the Virgin Mobile TNT over a month ago. Looks like it’s ready for purchase now. You can nab it for $20. Not a bad deal at all.

This post was taken from Prepaidreviews.com - a top source of information on prepaid cell phones and prepaid providers like Verizon INPulse, Cricket Wireless and more.

We’ve done our best here at Prepaid Reviews to not proclaim the death of the MVNO. Many of them have fallen on tough times — and that includes some that are still in existence, not just those which bit the dust. Mark Lowenstein at Fierce Wireless makes us feel better about it. He’s penned an article about the next generation of MVNOs, and how they will differ from what we’re currently seeing.

His main examples of evolutionary MVNOs: Apple and Jitterbug. The latter we know about. The former? It seems kind of strange. We heard that Apple had planned to form an MVNO, but that never happened. Instead, Lowenstein is using a more liberal definition of an MVNO. Apple might have the right formula in offering a top of the line device and basing its revenue stream off that, rather than minutes and services.

In one smooth paragraph, Lowenstein hits on a ton of major issues:

To understand how MVNOs might be successful in this new clothing, we should understand why so many Version 1.0 MVNOs struggled. First, as retail wireless prices declined, the “spread” between wholesale and retail disappeared, leaving little margin on voice. Second, the relationship between the host operator and the MVNO has often been strained. Virgin USA, Boost Mobile and TracFone have been MVNO success stories because the operators were happy to “outsource” their prepaid business. In many other cases, MVNOs were treated as second-class citizens with respect to the latest devices, data network availability, or advanced features such as GPS. Clearly, many made significant errors themselves. They were naive about the capital involved and mis-spent what they had in some cases; misread their segments; and faltered on execution. Finally, I would say that their value proposition was not differentiated enough. Again, look at Apple. In nearly all aspects, the customer experience is significantly different, which we can see in the way people are using their iPhones.

He goes on to talk about Verizon and their Open Development Initiative, which will allow new phone manufacturers into the fray. It will also open avenues for developers, who can offer their applications on those new phones. With Verizon’s strategy of allowing these entities to create MVNOs of their own, we could see the entire conception of an MVNO changed. Now, instead of just going to a specific, brand-driven MVNO, you can go to an independent retailer, get a quality phone, and MVNO service right in one package.

Like most issues, there’s a sports analogy with the MVNO. The press is wont to call a team dead late in the season. It either resonates with the fan base, or riles them up. Either way, the media entity sells more papers, or drives more traffic to its website. Likewise, the press is quick to play taps for MVNOs. In both instances, just because the press says its dead doesn’t mean it is so. With MVNOs, we might just be seeing the beginning.

This post was taken from Prepaidreviews.com - a top source of information on prepaid cell phones and prepaid providers like Verizon INPulse, Cricket Wireless and more.

The growth rate for smaller market cellular operators is down for the quarter. This includes seven operators, including U.S. Cellular, Leap, MetroPCS, and four other regional carriers: Centennial, Qwest, Cincinnati Bell, and Ntelos. Combined, they’re up to 17 million subscribers, up from 15.09 at this time last year, representing a 12.7 percent growth. Last year, however, these carriers grew 16.3 percent. This number wasn’t held back by Metro or Leap, ranking two and three among the mentioned carriers, respectively. Metro grew 29.5 percent, and Leap 23.6 percent. Even they, though, have seen declining growth over the past year.

Sadly, though, both Metro and Leap saw declines in ARPU. Metro saw the worst of it, down $1.41. Leap dropped 78 cents, and still maintains a slightly higher mark than its rival Metro. ARPU was up at all of the other mentioned carriers, except Ntelos, which saw the worst loss of them at $1.53.

We’re getting into tougher times for all cellular operators. The economy isn’t at its best, and we’re seeing a level of saturation in the U.S. cellular market. In fact, JupiterResearch claims that we’ll see slowing growth through 2013. It’s only going to make things tough on the smaller carriers.

I know it’s probably not going to happen, but does anyone else see merger opportunities here? Or should the small carriers just stay small? It’s a question they’ll have to figure out over the next few years.

This post was taken from Prepaidreviews.com - a top source of information on prepaid cell phones and prepaid providers like Verizon INPulse, Cricket Wireless and more.

The months of April through June were not kind to Virgin Mobile. While they introduced an unlimited calling plan and acquired Helio, those two moves didn’t occur until the final week of the quarter. They took some lumps before that, losing 111,273 customers in those three months, according to Reuters. Over 728,000 people signed up for the company’s plans, but even more decided to quit.

The big killer, and part of the reason the company’s profit was down 50 percent, is average revenue per user. ARPU is an important stat in the industry, and Virgin’s fell 7.9 percent from last year, to $19.32. The hope is that the unlimited plans help out that figure for the third quarter. Additionally, the completion of the Helio deal should open up Virgin for a number of more expensive, possibly contract-based plans, which should also help the figure.

Churn was actually better than expected, at 5.6 percent. That seems rather high, but it’s not bad for a company that doesn’t require you to sign a contract.

CEO Dan Schulman has said that he wishes to get the Helio acquisition completed within the next few weeks. Helio is still working on cutting its costs by 70 percent, which they are obligated to do before the deal is complete. Schulman on the deal:

“The Helio acquisition is transformative for us. The addition of a post-paid platform, outstanding data services, and compelling handsets will enable us to offer more value to our entire customer base; prepaid, hybrid and post-paid alike.”

The second quarter is traditionally a rough one for cell carriers. I’ll bet we see better results from Virgin when we get the results in October/November.

This post was taken from Prepaidreviews.com - a top source of information on prepaid cell phones and prepaid providers like Verizon INPulse, Cricket Wireless and more.