Beware of the MVNO
I’ve been reading All Hail the iPhone by mike davidson (interesting premises, but ultimately drawing wrong conclusions big time, imho) in which he writes briefly about mobile virtual network operators, or mvnos in short. This reminded me of a little incident when i was about to switch from prepaid to a service subscription:
I went to one of the stores of the service provider i wanted to sign up with. While making all the necessary arrangements for my subscription (getting papers copied, signing the contract, this takes a while) i couldn’t but overhear the complaints of another customer in the store, who actually wasn’t a customer of this particular service provider, but of an mvno. Not a big player like modern mvnos (like virgin or at&t), but a small company that eventually went bankrupt. Apparently, the mvno was responsible for service provision, but contract and billing was tied to the network provider. This left the customer in an incredibly awkward position: while the mvno couldn’t provide cellular service any longer, the customer was obliged to continue payment of his monthly fees to the actual network provider, effectively paying money for nothing.
I don’t know how it all turned out eventually as getting my contract didn’t take that long, but i certainly learnt to check my cell service contracts rigidly before signing them.