MVNO Targets Very Rich/Very Stupid Demographic

Joseph Laszlo | November 18, 2005, 12:01 PM

Well timed with the publication of Jupiter's report on MVNOs comes news of the launch of VOCE [InformationWeek, via Yahoo!], a new entrant targeting a very particular market segment.

A $1,500 entry fee just to sign on will certainly keep the riff-raff out, and a $500 monthly fee for unlimited usage will keep the intelligent wireless subscribers away, too.

Quoting from the article: "Voce's services, to become available this year, include unlimited calling, data downloads, "velvet glove" customer service, the latest technologies, and a new cell phone every four months, according to the company."

VOCE is going to run on Cingular's network, making it one of that carrier's first MVNOs. What might be interesting would be if Cingular was willing to set things up so that VOCE customers got call priority, and were quantifiably less likely to have calls drop, and quantifiably got better voice quality out of the network. Then it might actually be worth having. But I can't see Cingular being terribly likely to do this, and there's nothing in the release about better quality of service.

The challenge here is that while handsets are certainly status symbols, mobile services aren't. Assuming a caller can't tell the person they're calling is a VOCE customer, that customer doesn't get much status benefit from the network. Like, if VOCE could somehow snag a unique area code and convince everyone their code was cool, that would be distinctive. But it's hard to see any upstart number displacing "212" as the most desirable area code in the US.

Still though, the rich-and-stupid audience segment is not a bad one. They're out there, and VOCE doesn't need to convince many of 'em that "more expensive=better" to have a very viable business model. I wish them luck at that.