ORLANDO, Fla.-What would a CTIA Wireless event be without lots of carrier news. Sure, the big operators typically garner the limelight, but smaller players were also in the house and making news of their own.
Virgin Mobile USA
Virgin Mobile USA L.L.C. said it plans to offer multimedia messaging for as low as one cent per message, following up on the success of its penny-texting bundles.
Beginning April 10, the mobile virtual network operator’s customers can sign up for one of three levels of messaging packs: a $2 per month package that allows them to send and receive 50 messages; a $5 pack for 200 messages sent and received; and a $10 per month bundle that allows up to 1,000 picture, text and instant messages.
The MVNO currently charges 25 cents to send or receive picture messages without a bundle, and text messages and IMs are 5 cents apiece. Virgin Mobile USA said that its 4.6-million customer base sent and received 1.5 billion text messages, 11 million picture messages and 34 million IMs last year.
Virgin Mobile USA also announced a strategic partnership with Yahoo Inc. to offer its users Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo Mail beginning in early April, as well as prominently featuring Yahoo’s mobile Web on the MVNO’s deck.
The instant messaging and e-mail applications will be available for download on handsets such as the Switch Back and Cyclops, and will be preloaded on some future phones, according to Virgin Mobile USA.
Leap
Leap Wireless International Inc. plans to launch a ringback service later this year in partnership with NMS Communications Corp., with billing and clearing services provided by Wmode Inc. Customers of the carrier’s Cricket brand will be able to select music, sounds or celebrity voices to occupy callers instead of the traditional ringing.
The service allows customers to select from several options, including “radio station play,” in which a user selects a genre of music that is randomly played for callers; shuffle play, which randomly chooses ringbacks from the subscriber’s library to play when a call is received; and a “gift song” option in which a subscriber can purchase a song and send it to another subscriber.
