Why the big boost? América Móvil, the Latin America multinational telecom provider that owns TracFone, didn’t give specifics. But it just so happens that in January TracFone started selling the iPhone 5 at Walmart through its Straight Talk brand.

The offer presents a cheap alternative for consumers craving Apple’s latest and greatest device. You still have to pay the unsubsidized iPhone 5 price of $649, but Walmart spreads it out over 26 monthly payments of $25. Meanwhile Straight Talk’s prepaid service comes in at just $45 a month, including unlimited SMS, voice and data, though Straight Talk will start throttling back speeds if you consume much more than 2 GB each month.

That plan is even cheaper than T-Mobile’s new “Un-carrier” $50 tier while also offering more data. The major drawback is that you  don’t get 4G access.  As a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), TracFone buys network access from the major carriers. The iPhone deal uses either Sprint or Verizon Wireless’s CDMA networks, but so far Tracfone hasn’t gotten permission from either to use their LTE services, which can deliver data speeds up ten times faster than their older 3G EV-DO systems.

In its earnings statement (PDF), América Móvil said that its big subscriber gains are coming from Straight Talk and its new brand targeting Mexican nationals Telcel América. Both brands offer more expensive plans than Tracfone’s core prepaid service focused on budget users. Consequently, its average revenue per subscriber jumped 16 percent year over year to $19 a month.

There’s no way to know for certain whether the iPhone is driving those Straight Talk gains unless Tracfone starts releasing device figures. But more of the prepaid operators’ customers seem to be gravitating toward higher-end devices like the iPhone and purchasing more expensive service plans.

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FierceWireless first reported on the new plan, but we confirmed the details with Verizon today. The $35 tier targets text junkies using basic phones, offering unlimited SMS and web surfing but only 500 voice minutes. Four feature phones — the LG Cosmos 2 and Extravert and the Samsung Gusto 2 and Intensity III — are available under the plan, and it’s not transferable to other devices. Extra minutes cost an additional 25 cents.

Verizon is no stranger to prepaid, but unlike Sprint and T-Mobile, it hasn’t focused much effort on the segment. At the end of 2012, Verizon had only 5.7 million prepaid subscribers out of 98.2 million retail accounts. In addition, much of Verizon’s recent attention has been directed at the upper tier of the prepaid market — tablets and data modems as well as no-contract smartphones plans.

By delving far below the $50 price tier, Verizon is venturing into the territory of prepaid-only players like Cricket Communications and MetroPCS, mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) like Tracfone and Sprint’s no-contract arms Virgin Mobile and Boost Mobile. Prepaid has enjoyed enormous growth over the last several years, so you can see why Verizon is interested, though it’s extremely late to the party.

LG Extravert

Verizon’s new love of prepaid likely has something to do with its rapidly emptying CDMA network. Since launching LTE two years ago, 50 percent of all of Verizon’s data traffic has migrated to those new 4G systems. Verizon essentially made 3G a fallback network for its next-generation of high-end smartphone users, and to fill the gap left over it’s only offering prepaid services over 2G and 3G phones.

The four feature phones on Verizon’s basic plan are no exception. While you get unlimited data with the plans, you’d have to try very hard to rack up even a modest data usage on these devices. They sport Opera browsers and a few email and social networking apps, but you won’t get access to any advanced applications. What’s more, they only hold CDMA 1X 2G radios, so connection speeds are quite slow.

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Ting said Thursday that it would be among the first in line to sell Samsung’s latest and greatest smartphone — which it coyly said is “commonly referred to as the Galaxy S4” — as soon as it is commercially available. (For all of the details of the official S 4 launch Thursday evening starting at 7pm ET (4pm PT), check out my colleague Kevin Tofel’s live blog.)

“In advance of Samsung’s big launch event tomorrow, we’re excited to say that we’ll be able to offer the follow up to the Samsung Galaxy S3, which we’ll call the Samsung Galaxy S 4 unless we’re provided reason to do otherwise,” Tucows Content Development Manager Andrew Moore-Crispin wrote in Tucows’ blog Wednesday. “What’s more, we’ll be able to do so at around the same time as the major carriers; on or at least around the actual launch day.”

That’s quite a coup for Ting, since MVNOs typically have to wait months — if not forever — to become official retailers of the hottest mobile devices. Not only do MVNOs have to court handset vendors that often have cozy relationships with the big carriers, but they also have to get permission from their carrier partners. In Ting’s case, Sprint provides it network access and ultimately it gets to decide whether Ting or any other Sprint MVNO gets to sell the same devices in its portfolio.

In the last year, though, carriers and Sprint in particular have loosened the leashes on their MVNOS, giving them access to goodies like hot devices and new 4G networks they would normally reserve for themselves. Ting became the first LTE MVNO in August, tapping into Sprint’s brand new 4G service shortly after it launched, and it only had to wait to two months before it could sell the Galaxy S3.

Even more recently those market barriers hindering MVNOs fell further. MVNO Solavei got an early drop on U.S. carriers by becoming the first operator to sell the BlackBerry(BBRY) Z10. Ting’s early access to the Galaxy S 4 is another example that MVNOs no longer have to put up with the big carriers’ scraps.

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In short, Sprint thinks that hotels, rental car agencies, airlines, supermarkets and big box retail stores – pretty much any business with a loyalty card – would make excellent resellers of its 3G and WiMAX data service. Hotels could rent or lend 4G data modems to their out-of-town guests; grocery stores could sell prepaid 3G hotspots right next to the batteries and the international dialing cards. Those data services could be linked directly to any loyalty program – for instance, for every megabyte you consume earn a frequent flyer mile or get 10 cents off your next purchase of frogurt.

Sprint is inviting these companies to become mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) on its data networks, offering a compelling proposition to companies that normally wouldn’t have a clue how to run a wireless business:  Sprint will deploy all of the infrastructure and manage the service, while its partners focus on their customers.

Photo by Tomás Fano

Such MVNOs could work much the way the hotel, airport and airline Wi-Fi services function: access to a key set of company Website functions might be free, but customers would buy access to the Internet at large by the hour, day, week or bucket. Companies would also have the opportunity to toy with those business models, for instance subsidizing access fees with advertising and sponsorship revenues or allowing customers who accrue a certain number of flight miles, hotel stays or grocery to tap into free buckets of megabytes.

The new program is part of the “MVNO in a box” platform Sprint launched in July. Traditionally MVNOs have pretty much supplied all of the components necessary to run a mobile operator – devices, back office and billing, customer service, etc. – save the actually mobile network. That means MVNOs have commonly been the purview of companies with the experience and infrastructure necessary to run a carrier or companies like Best Buy willing to invest in those resources.

Sprint’s new single source platform, however, is geared at anyone with a customer base and a Website. Sprint is contracting with Telespree to handle the activation and management of potentially millions of subscriptions spread over dozens of different brands through its cloud-based wireless data enablement platform.

So far Sprint is making its WiMAX and CDMA networks available through the program, so its biggest impact may be regional. Sprint is an MVNO of sorts itself, reselling Clearwire’s WiMAX service, which is available in about one-third of the US. Its CDMA EV-DO network, however, probably doesn’t have the oomph to stand in as a primary mobile broadband service. Once Sprint completes the rollout of its LTE network, though, it will probably start offering it up to its MVNO partners. Many operators are keeping their newest networks close to their vests, but Sprint has already allowed MVNOs like Ting to tap into its nascent LTE systems.

 Hotel sign image courtesy of Flickr user Tomas Fano 

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Three different carriers. Three completely different approaches to the market. The only thing they have in common — besides being part of the newest wave of mobile virtual network operators (MVNOS) — is that they are questioning long-accepted mobile business models. As mobile evolves from a carrier-dominated, vertically integrated and voice-centric industry into a more inclusive, data-focused one, they’re making the case that our fundamental notions of what a carrier is and what it provides should evolve as well.

That transformation will be a major theme at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference next month in San Francisco. David Morken, CEO of Bandwith.com (Republic’s parent); Scott Bendar, co-founder and CTO of FreedomPop; and Ahmed Khattak, co-founder and CEO of GSM Nation will be on the stage at Mobilize to debate the merits of their new approaches to wireless market.

But the transformation of the industry isn’t just limited to carriers. The switch from voice to data has led every link in the mobile value chain to question assumptions formed when the world used wireline networks for data and mobile networks for voice. Device makers have changed the way handsets are designed. Internet companies are grappling with the fact that their customers are moving away from the PC to small-screen devices, with their limited real estate and more challenging revenue models. And infrastructure makers and carriers are re-architecting the fundamental topologies of their networks.

We’re seeing examples of it all over the industry. Facebook’s IPO was clouded by the revelation that it had no idea how to port its advertising-based revenue model over to mobile phones. A growing number of developers are looking to mobile as their first and sometimes only platform. For a company like Foursquared the smartphone isn’t so much a telephony or a computing platform as it is an extension of its owner’s presence in the world. Path (whose CEO Dave Morin is also speaking at Mobilize) has discounted the PC completely, believing the future of social networking relies solely on mobile devices.

In handsets, device makers are grappling with new form factors and users interfaces as the phones original primary function, voice calls, falls to the wayside and the need to create a more immersive data experience comes to the forefront. New large-screened devices like Samsung’s Galaxy Note are blurring the distinction between smartphone and tablet, and my colleague Kevin Tofel believes that one day tablets will replace the smartphone entirely.

Nokia Siemens Networks’ conception of a heterogeneous network

On the network side, carriers and their infrastructure vendors have begun realizing that the big t0wer-based macro-umbrella networks that fueled two decades of voice services aren’t going to cut it in a data-centric world. They’re designing new types of small cells and base stations intended to deliver intense levels of bandwidth over limited areas. Those small cell deployments will eventually evolve into the new heterogeneous network, or HetNet, which will transform cellular systems from coverage-to capacity-focused topologies. Today’s carrier networks have tens of thousands of cells. Future networks will hundreds of thousands if not millions of cells.

The next few years are going to be tumultuous as we negotiate these seismic shifts from mobile voice to mobile data and from the PC-centric to the mobile-centric Internet. Not every MVNO, app developer and infrastructure maker is going to make it. We’ve already seen a big shakeup on the equipment side (Nokia decline and the dissolution of Motorola and Nortel Networks), and the big incumbent mobile operators are struggling to understand their role in the mobile broadband age.

At Mobilize, we’ll be tackling a raft of topics related to that transformation. Here are a just a few speakers to look out for:

• The technology gurus of two major carriers will be in attendance. Sprint CTO Stephen Bye and T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray will discuss their aggressive plans to overhaul their respective carrier’s networks. T-Mobile and Sprint aren’t just launching LTE, they’re actively shutting down large swathes of their 2G networks, and in Sprint’s case, pursuing new small cell and heterogeneous network (HetNet) architectures.
• Samsung has always been a mover and shaker in the handset market, but the rise of the smartphone turned it into the world’s largest mobile device maker. Samsung VP of Global Product Innovation Yoon Lee will discuss with GigaOM’s Stacey Higginbotham how build on that lead and challenge the ever-present Apple.
• Dealing with constantly fluctuating connection speeds – or no data connections – offline synching and huge array of different operating systems are problems with which the old internet didn’t have to cope. Parse CTO Kevin Lacker will discuss how mobile devices becoming the endpoints of the Internet has made the industry rethink the PC-centered models on which data services were built.

Featured photo courtesy of Flickr user Mark Strozier

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As has been the case for the last two years, T-Mobile’s contract customers are departing. The problem is T-Mo couldn’t replace with them prepaid customers fast enough. T-Mobile lost 557,000 contract subscribers between April and June, offset by 227,000 net new prepaid subscribers.

The U.S. subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom also added 95,000 machine-to-machine connections, linking to its network to everything from point-of-sale payment devices to ice machines, and it gained 30,000 wholesale customers from its mobile virtual network operator partners such as TracFone’s Straight Talk. But both numbers were far below the M2M and wholesale gains it reported in previous quarters.

In all, T-Mobile is a smaller operator today than it was a year ago, having shrunk by about 400,000 subscribers since June 2011.

The bright spot for T-Mobile is that its customers are taking to T-Mobile’s ultra-cheap data plans. It sold 2.1 million smartphones in the last quarter, a 31 percent increase over last year’s second quarter. Those new smartphones drove up the  average revenue per user (ARPU) spent on data by 14.6 percent for contract customers, though overall ARPU in postpaid increased only slightly to $57.35 a month. The continued shift of smartphones to prepaid plans, however, increased prepaid ARPU by 13.6 percent to $26.81 a month.

The lack of the iPhone is still weighing heavily on T-Mobile. Though it isn’t working outright miracles for Sprint since it arrived on its network last fall, the carrier has leaned on the iPhone to deliver quarterly subscribers boosts. The Apple device is responsible for many of the defections to Sprint from other carriers.

T-Mobile has made no official announcement on the iPhone, but it is in the process of overhauling its network, which will make its network completely iPhone-compatible by next year. The sooner it gets the device, though, the sooner it has a key weapon in fighting off its much larger competitors.

If you want to learn more about T-Mobile’s aggressive network plans, check out GigaOM’s Mobilize conference next month where T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray is speaking on Sept 21.

T-Mobile image courtesy of Flickr user swruler9284

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The biggest concentration is in Europe, which hosts 526, or about 65 percent, of the global total. That makes sense when you consider Europe’s huge number of operators: the region’s dozens of countries each have multiple operators, each of which, in turn, has multiple virtual operator partners. Considering North America, which Wireless Intelligence defines as the U.S. and Canada, includes only two countries, it still has an impressive number of MVNOs: 73.

That number doesn’t include the operator sub-brands the Tier I carriers own, for instance Sprint’s Boost Mobile, Virgin Mobile USA and Assurance Wireless. According to Wireless Intelligence there are 17 sub-brands in the U.S. and Canada and 224 globally.

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