Who said the MVNO space is sucking wind? In case you haven't heard, MVNO Amp'd Mobile, headed up by Peter Adderton, the founder of Boost Mobile, raised a ton dough to add to their impressive war chest. In just two years, yeah two years, LA-based Amp'd has raised just over $350 million including yesterday's latest round of $107 million. There were a lot of rumors circulating late last year regarding the MVNO's subscriber numbers. As you may know the company sells pre-paid wireless service with a heavy downloadable media component as their value proposition to the youth market. Well, anyway, rumors were floating around (many got picked up in some of major trades) questioning their actual subscriber numbers. Amp'd put out a press release last September saying they were on track to hit 150,000 subscribers by the end of 2006. The press release also highlighted the fact that the average monthly bill for an Amp'd subscriber was over $100, nearly double the average cell phone bill. That in itself is quite impressive. However, at this point I believe the question (or challenge more specifically) really revolves around the market opportunity. Is it an additional 1.0 million subscribers or 5.0 million subscribers? That's the $107 million question. Truth be told, with only 150,000 to 200,000 subscribers, Amp'd barely shows up on our wireless industry research, even Virgin Mobile has more teen and college student subscribers, but both are still very, very small compared to the big guys like Verizon Wireless and Cingular. So maybe that is their strategy, stay relatively small in the space, say $1.0 billion as opposed to $8.0 to $10.0 billion for category leader Verizon Wireless. Lots of questions still to be answered, but one thing I know for sure, they definitely have the most impressive list of institutional and strategic investors I've seen in a long time.
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