Ting, the mobile arm of webhosting company Tucows, resells voice and data from Sprint’s CDMA and now its LTE networks. Typically carriers have placed restrictions on their MVNOs to prevent them from competing directly against them. That’s regulated MVNOs in the past to selling not only budget service but budget technology.

“All of the market trends we’re talking about today are allowing us to be competitive at the high-end,” Tucows CEO Elliot Noss said. “The reason we’re first is because of our nature as an internet company. We’re just more used to moving quickly.”

According to Noss, Sprint has stripped off the last remaining obstacles to MVNOs competing with it on equal terms. Sprint only barred the Galaxy S III from its partners for two months and made LTE access available to Ting and data MVNO FreedomPop immediately after its network went live. Why? Sprint sees the way the market the heading, Noss said.

While MVNOs practically died out in the last decade, in the last year they’ve seen a big resurgence. Those virtual carriers are experimenting with new pricing models, such as Ting’s metered voice and data plans, that run counter to way the big operators have always sold their services. So far, only a minority of customers finds these new types of models appealing, but it’s a growing minority, Noss said. Those customers are fleeing the major operators anyway, so Sprint has made the decision to keep a portion of that lost revenue by becoming an MVNO enabler, Noss concluded. (At GigaOM’s Mobilize conference next month, we’ll be exploring some of those with new MVNO models with speakers from FreedomPop, GSM Nation and Republic Wireless.)

Sprint may be MVNOs’ biggest champion but there is still one step it hasn’t been willing to take: handing over Apple’s iPhone to its partners. Some virtual operators like Tracfone’s Straight Talk and H2O Wireless sell SIM card plans for the iPhone, but no MVNO is allowed to sell the iPhone directly to their customers. The iPhone is just too big a subscriber lure for carriers to give up what little control over it they have.

But Noss said that will soon change as well. While Ting isn’t yet negotiating with Apple or Sprint for rights to sell the device, the market is definitely moving in that direction, he said. Numerous small operators are already selling the iconic device as are prepaid operators like Leap Wireless. It’s only a matter of time before the economics are right for Sprint to lift its iPhone restriction, Noss said.

“I’ll put it this way: I would be disappointed if we didn’t have the iPhone by next summer,” Noss said. “That kind of hold back of iconic devices is beginning to make less and less [business] sense.”

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VP of marketing Tony Miller said that FreedomPop still plans to launch late this summer or in early fall with Clearwire-powered WiMAX modems and its even more anticipated WiMAX sleeve, which fits over the iPhone 4 and 4S. “We’re going to launch with Clearwire, but we’ll be live with Sprint by the end of the year,” Miller said.

At that point FreedomPop plans to offer tri-mode WiMAX-LTE-CDMA modems and sleeves, but as Sprint’s LTE network nears completion in 2013, it will begin phasing out WiMAX radios and rely solely on its Sprint network. Miller said FreedomPop may revisit the Clearwire deal in 2013 if the carrier can launch its own LTE network as planned, but even then Clearwire has only committed to the same limited LTE footprint it currently covers with WiMAX.

What’s astonishing is that Sprint is throwing the gates of its LTE network wide open to wholesale partners shortly after it launches next week. Typically, operators keep their latest and greatest technologies for themselves – it took years before most carriers started offering MVNOs access to their 3G networks. But according to Miller, Sprint isn’t just being liberal with its network, it’s also being flexible in its pricing policies.

To say FreedomPop’s business model is odd is an understatement. It plans to give away 500 MB to every customer each month, and then allow customers to trade those megabytes like digital currency. Social networking features and value-added services like VoIP will provide additional revenue streams (as well as a means for customers to earn more free megabytes), but only customers that subscribe to premium data plans or exceed their free monthly allotments will actually pay for the data they consume.

That kind of business model, however, doesn’t fit with the ways most carriers sell wholesale. Usually, carriers charge per-device connection fees as well as for data consumed. Sprint is making an exception for FreedomPop (as Clearwire did before it) to charge only for the gross data tonnage FreedomPop uses, Miller said, which allows the MVNO to easily move megabytes between customers.

As I wrote last month, we’re seeing a renaissance of MVNOs in the U.S. Sprint is becoming a big destination for MVNOs because of its flexible policies, and recently many other operators have begun following its lead. In the last year, both T-Mobile and AT&T have become much more welcoming of MVNOs.

Sprint, though, appears to be countering its competitors’ new openness to wholesale models with an even more aggressive stance. In addition to FreedomPop, Sprint is making LTE immediately available to Ting. It’s unlikely any of the remaining big 4 will be so willing to share their brand new 4G networks with partners so quickly.

“At Sprint we believe that our wholesale customers’ success is our success,” Sprint President of global wholesale and emerging solutions Matt Carter said in a statement. “We deliver a suite of innovative solutions that are customizable to the needs of each company and we are thrilled to enable new and innovative business models.”

FreedomPop isn’t just expanding its national reach, it may also be bulking up its bank account. Venture Beat is reporting that FreedomPop has raised $7.5 million in its first round of funding. We’re checking with the company on the details and will update this post when we learn more.

Update:  FreedomPop’s Miller confirmed to us that the MVNO has in fact raised $7.5 million in first round funding, led by ManGrove and DCM, who join FreedomPop’s initial investor Atomico. Skype co-founder and Atomico CEO Niklas Zennström  is spearheading FreedomPop, which is one of the reasons the MVNO has garnered so much attention even though it’s still months away from launch.

LTE image courtesy of Shutterstock user Inq

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