Getting the blessing of regulators is just one of many hurdles carriers must clear when they acquire another carrier. Sometimes it’s the little things that add up to a complex, pressing matter.
When Alltel Corp. purchased Midwest Wireless last year, it also snatched up the smaller carrier’s BREW-hosting service, which presented transitional and technical issues for the 25 rural operators participating in Midwest’s BREW Express Signature Solution service. Those tier-three carriers
included Appalachian Wireless, Alaska Communications Systems Group Inc., Bermuda Cellular, Cellcom, Eloqui Wireless, Golden State Cellular, Guamcell Communications, Illinois Valley Cellular, Pioneer/Enid Cellular and Rural Cellular Corp.
Following the acquisition, Alltel and BREW-developer Qualcomm Inc. began working to transition those tier-three carrier’s BREW-hosted service from Midwest, which acted as a master agent for other operators, to Qualcomm’s in-house service.
“We gave notice to Qualcomm and the other carriers that this was not something we were interested in continuing,” Alltel spokesman Andy Moreau told RCR Wireless News, adding that the carriers have until March of 2008 to come up with another solution.
Hosting overlapped with Alltel
Moreau said the BREW-hosting service would’ve overlapped with the service it already provides its customers and that it was mostly a technical issue that Alltel wanted to resolve following the purchase of Midwest.
“We wanted to make sure that our customers would continue to have access to everything we offered,” he said.
Responding to a rumor that Qualcomm was shutting down its BREW-hosting service to tier-three carriers, Arvin Chander, VP of global carrier relations for Qualcomm Internet Services, said, “That’s absolutely false.” In light of the confusion, he added that Qualcomm needed to do more to educate its customers on the transition.
As recently as April 2006, Qualcomm was touting the success and quick adoption rate of Midwest’s BREW-hosted service. The carrier began offering the service in June 2004.
“Midwest Wireless is actually the only carrier we offered this service through,” Chander said. “When the acquisition was announced . at that point we realized this would come up.”
The smaller carriers benefited from the arrangement because Midwest managed their content catalogs. “Typically the operator wants to always manage the catalog,” he said. “What Midwest did was offer that solution as part of the service.”
For the last few months, Qualcomm has been working with Midwest’s hosted clients to find a seamless transition that will have minimal impact on customers. “That’s the last thing we wanted to do, impact the customer,” Chander said.
“We needed to now find out a way to point it to our servers. That’s taken a little bit more time that we’d planned,” he said. “We’ve got the solution in place, now it’s a matter of getting the other agreements in place.”
With Qualcomm bringing some BREW-hosting and management services back in-house, it’s taking on new relationships with customers.
“What we have decided to do going forward is to take some of those responsibilities on ourselves, so that’s probably changed from before,” Chander added.
