Open Mobile

» see openmobilepr.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Open Mobile was established on 12 June 2007, and what it was built out of matters more than the date. NewComm Wireless Services had been running the Movistar brand in Puerto Rico and had gone into bankruptcy protection. Two American private equity firms, M/C Venture Partners and Columbia Capital, bought the network for $160 million and restarted it under a new name with a new idea about how to sell it.

The idea was that nobody should have to sign anything. Open Mobile was the first provider in Puerto Rico to offer wireless service with no contract, paid in advance, and the competition copied it afterward. It ran on CDMA, never on iDEN, and it was an eligible telecommunications carrier, which meant it could sell the federally subsidized Lifeline plans. On an island deep in a long economic contraction, subsidized service was one of the few segments still growing while the rest of the market sat flat.

Its tagline was "Te Decimos la Verdad", we tell you the truth, and it sat in the title of every page on its website for as long as the website existed. A carrier whose whole pitch is that it is not tricking you tells you something about what the customers of the other carriers believed was happening to them.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the LTE bet ~

In April 2012 Open Mobile launched LTE in metropolitan San Juan, after a friendly trial of about 150 users and a soft launch earlier that month. It used 700 MHz spectrum, with Ericsson supplying the radio side and Cisco the gateways, and it aimed to cover seventy percent of the island's population by December. Its infrastructure director put the reasoning plainly: meeting data demand with 3G was costing more than building LTE. At that point it had around 350,000 subscribers and between sixty and seventy percent of them were already on smartphones.

On 2 October 2012 it announced the full build at $250 million, covering most of Puerto Rico plus parts of Vieques and Culebra, and in the same breath it gave up the thing that had defined it. Alongside the network it introduced device agreements running from twelve months up to twenty-four, with a pro-rated early exit fee, breaking away from the strictly prepaid no-contract structure it had used since entering the market. The carrier that sold you freedom from contracts started selling contracts in order to pay for its network.

~ what Sprint wanted ~

By January 2017 the company was reported to be struggling, with falling revenues, and a deal was in its final stages. Sprint and Open Mobile announced a joint venture on 23 February 2017 covering Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. Open Mobile contributed all of its operations, its network, its employees, its stores and its retail subscribers. Sprint contributed its own assets and its prepaid subscribers and paid a fee to manage the postpaid ones. At announcement Sprint held 68 percent of the economics and 55 percent of the votes; by the time the deal closed its economic share had moved to 72.

What Sprint was buying was radio. The federal filings list Open Mobile's PCS licenses and its 700 MHz holdings being assigned across along with the microwave links, and they show Sprint's attributed spectrum in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands rising sharply as a result. One source quoted at the time put it without decoration: Sprint was essentially buying frequency and signal to add to its network. The Lifeline certification was part of the attraction too, because Sprint did not have it there.

Regulatory approval came at the end of September 2017, nine days after Hurricane Maria made landfall. By early October the federal regulator was reporting that more than eighty percent of Puerto Rico's cell sites were out of service. The joint venture closed quietly in the middle of November, with both companies still in the middle of restoring service, and the chief executive's statement at the close was mostly about the rebuild rather than the transaction.

~ te decimos la verdad ~

The brand went on 30 May 2018. Stores began converting to Boost Mobile that day, confirmed afterward by the company's own executives and reported in the Puerto Rican press in June; the conversion ran through the summer. Boost offered unlimited calls and data across Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and the mainland from $35 a month, with family plans Open Mobile had never sold. Part of the rationale given was that travel between the island and the mainland had risen after Maria, because people were leaving.

Boost itself did not stay either. Sprint merged into T-Mobile, and Boost's Puerto Rico customers were eventually moved on again to Liberty. These were subscribers whose original selling point was that nobody would move them around without telling them, and they were moved twice more by companies they had never chosen.

The website was the last thing standing. Long after the stores said Boost, openmobilepr.com went on answering with a full Open Mobile homepage: the old tagline in the title, the customer service number spelled out as 787-661-OPEN, the Lifeline page and the LTE page. It was still there on 16 January 2021, nearly three years after the brand was retired. Sometime that year it stopped. The domain fell to a parking page, and by 2023 an Indonesian gambling operation was serving slot-machine copy from the address that used to promise Puerto Rico the truth.

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