Nextel - Sleeping Giant of Wireless Data

Forbes Magazine has published a nice overview to Nextel. Thanks to Jim Coyer for his pointer to this article.

Long dismissed as a "blue-collar" only carrier, Nextel is the sleeper candidate among the carriers to win big with wireless data. Instead of focusing on consumer entertainment at $3 average revenue per month (ARPU), they have focused on wireless business data applications at $50 ARPU. They have quietly put together a winning combination of:

- focus on business customers and the required customer support,

- simple straightforward business application support,

- sensible pricing,

- decent developer support,

- uniform and coherent wireless data device strategy, focused on Java,

- suite of add on features and accessories important to businesses: keyboards, data cables, printers, bar-code scanners, GPS, etc.

- inexpensive data-enabled handsets,

- billing plans that make sense for a business (For example, Nextel allows customers to purchase a mobile phone with local service and data plan ONLY for their employees. If the employees want to add a more complete voice plan for their personal use, they can opt to add that service and will recieve their own separate bill.)

Because of this Nextel reaps the obvious rewards:

- high subscriber ARPU: $71 vs industry standard of $50, and

- low churn: 1. 3% vs. AT&Ts 3.3%

I long for the rest of the wireless carriers to take seriously the opportunity of wireless data technology for businesses.