Republic Wireless

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

~ the goodbye ~

Nobody was ever going to sell me this. Republic Wireless was a United States virtual operator riding wholesale capacity on American networks, and Turkey in those years had three networks with almost nothing in the way of resale on top of them. So I followed it as an engineer follows somebody else's clever plumbing, which is to say for the design and not for the price.

The company was created in January 2010 inside Bandwidth.com, a wholesale voice business in Raleigh, North Carolina. Beta service opened on 8 November 2011 on a single handset, the LG Optimus S, at nineteen dollars a month for unlimited everything. The private beta became a public one on 19 November 2012, and the company came out of beta properly on 14 November 2013 with the Moto X at $299 and plans that started at five dollars.

The mechanism is what made it worth watching. Wifi was the primary network and the cellular connection was the failover, inverted from how every other carrier thought about it, with a proprietary VoIP app on Android doing the switching. PC World went after the word unlimited almost immediately, because the early terms carried a fair use threshold and reserved the right to throw you off for crossing it. The company removed that threshold in December 2011, six weeks after launch.

It spun out of Bandwidth.com in December 2016 and kept going on its own. In December 2017 it announced Relay, a screenless LTE and wifi walkie-talkie for children, which shipped in May 2018 and outlived everything else the company made. Republic itself was close to a hundred million dollars of annual revenue in 2019 and was carrying about 200,000 subscribers by 2021.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the handover trick ~

Moving a live call between two radios that know nothing about each other is hard, and Republic did it in stages over several years. In 2013 it could carry a call that started on wifi out to a cell tower. By 2015 it could do the reverse, picking a call up off the tower and dropping it onto a wifi network as you walked through your own front door.

Bonded calling arrived in 2016, using the cellular connection to prop up a call that stayed on wifi. The whole price depended on keeping minutes off the expensive network, so the plumbing was not a feature on top of the business, it was the business. Carriers eventually shipped most of this as wifi calling and nobody thought about it again.

~ what dish actually wanted ~

Dish Network announced on 8 March 2021 that it was buying the company for an undisclosed price, and closed the deal in May, as part of a run of purchases that also took in Boost Mobile and Ting Mobile. The plan was to collect subscribers who could be moved onto Dish's own 5G network once there was one. Industry analyst Martha DeGrasse read it differently at the time and said Dish had probably bought Republic for its engineers and its technology rather than for the customer base, which the next two years supported.

The Relay hardware was split off into a separate company and stayed in Raleigh. Co-founder Chris Chuang left Republic and Robert Currie took over running it. In July 2021 Dish moved the service off T-Mobile and onto AT&T, and that December it reworked the plans and the logo, to a reception from existing customers that one of them summarized as not being able to find the door fast enough.

On 10 July 2023 Dish said Republic Wireless was shutting down and that everyone was going to Boost Infinite, keeping the $25 rate. The transfer finished on 31 August 2023. Plenty of people reported losing service while it ran, on a migration run by the company that had bought a carrier known for handing calls between networks without dropping them.

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