:
Had an hour-long conversation with Sky Dayton, the CEO of SK-Earthlink, at the company’s temporary offices in Westwood. It was for background-only interview, though not necessarily off-the-record (except for the time when he was mentioning the train wreck of, oh well…we’ll leave it at that), but I can still write about the general drift of the conversation.
If you don’t know about SK-Earthlink, well, you’re not alone….it has lied low and working on its service, in contrast to its MVNO rival Amp’d, which I’ve publicly chided as being too much hype for now. SKE is a joint venture between Earthlink and SK Telecom, Korea’s biggest telecom player, and the venture is capitalized to the extent of $440 million. It is a mobile service aimed at the young crowd and is supposed to launch in Spring 2006.
This is the weekend before CTIA starts on Monday, so everyone at SKE’s offices are scrambling to get ready for it…but as Sky mentioned, they’re not planning to make any major announcements at the conference.
SKE is betting big on SK’s Korean experience, and hopes that the billion dollar R&D pipeline from the Korean company and its experiences in that country will help SKE make it in U.S. It is, in theory, a great proposition, but they said the same thing about iMode being replicated across various countries, and that’s didn’t go exactly as expected.
As Sky explained to me, being an MVNO is not a cheap or easy proposition, despite what the other MVNO efforts and media have been saying…it takes at least half a billion dollars just to get off the ground, and it takes a lot of expertise in telecom, networking, consumer markets, retailing, billing and countless other things. He is betting his and his powerhouse team’s experience will bring that with SKE. His
The brand name is still to be decided, but it is going to try the same youth and edgy route as everyone else is trying: Virgin Mobile, Amp’d and others coming into the market. The handset strategy is being worked out, but as he alluded, he is more amneable to using Korean handsets, for obvious reasons. Expect it to have a mix of cellular networks of Sprint and Verizon, Wi-Fi capabilities (from Boingo, possibly) and TV receiver chips (using Korean DMB standard? He won’t say..).
Sky’s still holding his cards close the chest, as to what the differentiating factors on the front end will be, besides his experience and SK’s pipeline…We’ll be watching keenly.
Subscriber content
?
Subscriber content comes from Gigaom Research, bridging the gap between breaking news and long-tail research. Visit any of our reports to learn more and subscribe.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Comments have been disabled for this post