Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Verizon and Tracfone

Verizon Wireless has ended its premium billing relationship with Tracfone. Tracfone is an independent provider of prepaid wireless services.

Hence Tracfone subscribers who use the Verizon Wireless network will no longer be able to access premium SMS services. Roughly 1 million Tracfone users are impacted. Content providers need to opt-out all Tracfone users, and prevent them from attempting any PSMS transaction.

Contact us for the list of Tracfone MDNs (phone numbers).

Virgin Mobile

Quios is pleased to announce that it has added Virgin Mobile to its list of supported carriers. Virgin Mobile counts more than 3 million subscribers and as an MVNO uses the Sprint network.

Virgin Mobile will support standard and premium rate text campaigns (no binary or content download campaigns for now). We expect Virgin to start accepting new campaigns as of August 1, 2006.

Quios offers the widest coverage of all aggregators in the market, connecting to 11 US carriers: Verizon, Cingular Orange, Cingular Blue, Sprint, Nextel, Boost, T-Mobile, Dobson/Cellular One, Alltel, US Cellular, and Virgin Mobile.

Contact us for more information.

Monday, May 15, 2006

Q1 2006 Subscriber numbers

The 10-Q quarterly reports to the SEC and press releases by various carriers offer a good insight in the latest subscriber numbers. We've aggregated the numbers below for your convenience.

According to the CTIA website, there are 213 million wireless subscribers in the US. Quios connects to over 93% of all wireless subscribers in the US.

Q1 2006 US Subscribers
Wireless CarrierSubscribersMarket Share
Cingular55,800,00026.2%
Verizon Wireless53,020,00024.9%
Sprint/Nextel/Boost48,900,00023.0%
T-Mobile USA22,700,00010.6%
Alltel10,800,0005.1%
US Cellular5,500,0002.6%
Dobson/Cellular One1,670,0000.8%

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Alltel Prepaid Customers

Alltel is implementing an enhancement to its billing platform that will prevent Alltel prepaid customers from being billed for premium SMS services. The tentative implementation date is May 8, 2006. This will lead to increased premium SMS failure rates from that day onwards. Alltel is working on a longer term solution to allow prepaid customers to purchase 3rd party content. It is anticipated that such solution will be released towards the end of this year.

At the same time, Alltel is increasing subscriber spending limits for 3rd party content to $35.00 per short code per user per month. Alltel is managing the enforcement of this spending cap. The previous limit was $25.00.