Abhishek Tiwari

The ad based free mobile service concept isn’t new. It has been discussed on Tech/wireless blogs, Business 2.0 columns and in tech conferences. Virgin Mobile USA also decided to jump into this by offering their Sugar Mama service. However Virgin’s service isn’t as seamless as everyone imagined.

Enter Mosh Mobile, the mobile MVNO service which is in Beta right now. Yes you heard me right, its in Beta. Very novel concept for a MVNO. Not only that, it is also restricting access to only a chosen few (kinda like early days of GMail). The site boldly states “you gotta know someone to be someone”. These guys continue the edgy theme popularized by Boost and the late Amp’d. They havent announced who is the base carrier. My speculation is that the carrier is Sprint. I am basing it on the fact that Mosh’s site states that users must dial *2 on their phones for customer support, which is standard on any Sprint phone.

Let’s talk features. The guys at Mosh Mobile are going whole hog with this offering. They intend to offer the whole enchilada in just One plan. The language reminded me of Steve Job’s presentation of Leopard’s pricing (comparing to 1000 price options for Vista). Again the service says, “We only offer one plan… who needs more… when the one you have kicks ass?”. Nice…

Here are the features they are offering from the get go.

In addition they are also planning to offer typically premium services such as Internet access, MySpace, Twitter and Visual VoiceMail. Yes all of this is for free. All the user has to do is to receive text advertisements. Ads are also placed on Web pages served on the devices browser. Mosh also plans to collect subscriber data and analyze it further to allow its advertisers to deliver ads much more effectively.

Subsrciber privacy still remains a question as there isn’t much mentioned on that. Also I would like to see what types of handsets they offer. They do mention that the handsets will be cheap. I am really hoping that they can offer low end handsets for free.

All this sounds nice and happy. I will definitely check it out and should be a hit for students. So how do we know that these guys will survive and excel in a very challenging market? We all have seen the demise of ESPN mobile and recently Amp’d. How do we know they are not headed in the same direction? Let’s look at some typical

My first reaction is that they have lot of things in their favor. Competition is not much of a problem once you offer services for free. Also their offering seems top notch with latest web applications, aimed squarely at the young demographic.

Only future will tell. I wish good luck to these guys and hope they succeed. They might give the big boys something to think about.

Share This