Poland: MOBILKING - a MNVO for tough guys

[Motel75]

Mobilking - The network for sexist Polish chain-smoking male sports fans who don't use data, like to recharge often, have no foreign friends, and are likely to buy things that have pictures of naked girls on them.

Quite a demographic, eh?

[andy]

Originally Posted by Motel75

Mobilking - The network for sexist Polish chain-smoking male sports fans who don't use data, like to recharge often, have no foreign friends, and are likely to buy things that have pictures of naked girls on them.

Quite a demographic, eh?

A perfect marketing opportunity for someone else to launch yet another mvno, with "For our customers we provide special female gadgets and female entertainment" for neglected women

[Przemolog]

Originally Posted by andy

A perfect marketing opportunity for someone else to launch yet another mvno, with "For our customers we provide special female gadgets and female entertainment" for neglected women

Hmm, Harlequin stories and soap operas in MMSes ?

But seriously - it may not be that easy. The 3 Polish MVNOs (the first one started in Dec 06) had "huge" number of 53 600 customers at the end of 07 (official data of the Main Statistical Office) at 38 million population . To compare, the 4th "real" operator Play(sart in March 07), gained first million in 10 months.

So far, MVNO SIMs have been hard to buy and top-up and practically not advertised. Moreover, calls between them and SIMs from their "host" networks are all off-net (in fact, the same situation is with "fake" MVNOs Heyah and Sami Swoi, but at least they can be bought and recharged "normally").

Another interesting MVNO is "pending" here - of course I'll let you know when it goes "on-line"

[Przemolog]

Originally Posted by Motel75

Mobilking - The network for sexist Polish chain-smoking male sports fans who don't use data, like to recharge often, have no foreign friends, and are likely to buy things that have pictures of naked girls on them.

They don't necessarily like recharge often - simply they have to choose between recharging and buying cigarettes/beer/non-grape local "wine" . They may also have foreign friends - I mean their pals who emmigrated to "17th voivedoship" and now have +44 or +353 instead of +48 numbers

Originally Posted by Motel75

Quite a demographic, eh?

What do you mean - that there are many of potential MOBILKING users here? Sure, there are many

[Motel75]

Originally Posted by Przemolog

They don't necessarily like recharge often - simply they have to choose between recharging and buying cigarettes/beer/non-grape local "wine" . They may also have foreign friends - I mean their pals who emmigrated to "17th voivedoship" and now have +44 or +353 instead of +48 numbers

Heh-heh. Naah, I just meant the international calls aren't all that cheap. (Now there's a market opportunity in Poland, what with a TPSA landline call to the USA or Europe costing 1.49 PLN. TELE2 charges 66 Gr -- still 25 US cents a minute.) And three-month non-extendable recharges aren't exactly competitive...

[Przemolog]

Originally Posted by Motel75

Heh-heh. Naah, I just meant the international calls aren't all that cheap. (Now there's a market opportunity in Poland, what with a TPSA landline call to the USA or Europe costing 1.49 PLN. TELE2 charges 66 Gr -- still 25 US cents a minute.) And three-month non-extendable recharges aren't exactly competitive...

Yes, but international calls from mobile phones are generally crazy expensive here (especially to landlines or all phones in RPP countries). The weiderst thing is that international rates in Tak-Tak, mBank mobile, iPlus simdata (and until last summer also in Simplus) are still based on pre-2004 monopolist tariffs of Telecom Pologne . The only workaround is in Orange - availability of 708 callthrough numbers (of course, with all the disadvantages: paying for dialling and, what follows, for unaswered/busy calls.