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.
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