Blame Ryan Reynolds.
With a new wireless brand from the hosts of SmartLess emerging last week, and the debut of Trump Mobile this week, it sure seems like there’s a hot new trend in Celebrities Selling Things: phone service. How did it come to this? Why can’t they just stick to tequila? I talked to a couple of experts about the situation, and it’s not entirely the Deadpool actor’s fault. But also: it is kind of his fault.
To be clear, none of these celebrities / political figures are building new cell networks from scratch. What they’re launching are Mobile Virtual Network Operators, or MVNOs. These are companies that buy wireless service from the three big US carriers and re-sell it. It’s a business model that has existed for decades, Techsponential analyst Avi Greengart tells me. “They address market segments that carriers can’t or don’t want to address with their main brands,” he says. Older customers, people whose first language isn’t English, people with bad credit – they’re all prime targets for MVNOs.
It’s an attractive arrangement for the big carriers since they may have extra network capacity that would otherwise go unused. “They get a guaranteed return on their networ …
