Ovivo Mobile

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

~ the obit ~

Ovivo Mobile sold a phone plan that cost nothing per month. Not a trial and not an introductory rate: zero pounds, indefinitely, in exchange for carrying one advertisement in your mobile browser. You paid a small one-off charge covering the SIM and the setup admin, and a portion of that came back to you as call credit when you activated the thing.

The company was founded in 2011 by Dariush Zand and ran as a virtual operator on Vodafone UK, which meant it bought wholesale minutes and resold them under its own brand without owning a single tower. It raised 414,000 pounds on Crowdcube against 25.48 percent of the equity, which made a few hundred small investors part owners of a mobile network. At its peak it carried somewhere around fifty thousand customers.

The idea had been tried before. Blyk ran the ad-funded model in Britain from 2007, giving under-25s free texts and minutes in exchange for up to six SMS ads a day, and gave up on the consumer version in August 2009. Ovivo's take was lighter: one ad in the browser instead of a daily stream of texts, and no age limit on who could sign up.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the wednesday ~

On Wednesday 19 March 2014 the service stopped. There had been no notice beforehand. Phones lost service, and the Twitter and Facebook accounts were deactivated that same day. Email sent to the company bounced back. The statement that eventually surfaced blamed reasons beyond the company's control.

What had happened, according to trade reporting afterward, was that Cognatel, the aggregator sitting between Ovivo and Vodafone's wholesale network, had terminated it over a dispute about network software. A virtual operator that loses its aggregator is left holding a brand and a customer list with no way to carry a call.

~ what was left to claim ~

What a British mobile customer needs when a network dies is a PAC code, the string that lets you carry your number to another operator. Ovivo's website stayed up long enough to issue them, carrying a warning that it would close on 10 April. The site and the PAC facility actually came down in June 2014, and anybody who had not moved their number by then lost it.

The Crowdcube investors lost their stake outright. Crowdfunded equity in a pre-profit virtual operator is about as exposed as consumer investment gets, and the platform's own risk warnings said as much, but the collapse was fast enough that the usual warning signs never had time to appear. No funding round visibly failed to close. No service degraded first.

~ no local version ~

Ovivo was United Kingdom only, held there by the wholesale agreement with Vodafone UK and by the advertising market that paid for the minutes. Turkey had no meaningful MVNO layer in those years, so there was no domestic version of this to have missed. Ad-funded mobile resurfaced every few years as a pitch somewhere else in the world. None of those versions ever had a Turkish SIM behind them.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »