Another MVNO Calls it Quits

"Data Pass" has passed.

" Jordan Kennedy, the company's founder tells BestMVNO that its carrier partners and MVNE had many back-end issues and pricing and plan changes. Some of those issues resulted in subscribers having their service stop working for no apparent reason. The aforementioned problems, which were largely out of Jordan's hands, made it difficult to run the business, and as a result, Jordan decided to close it down. Jordan says that DataPass had a small number of subscribers and they were able to keep their numbers and transfer over to a new carrier."

Sounds Déjà vu to me.

Back-end issues sound familiar.

Sad to see them go. It's definitely difficult to turn a profit on any sort of unlimited plan, and when your userbase is as small as we expect DP's was, it's little wonder Jordan had difficulty keeping it afloat.

I'm not sure if we really need all these mvnos. Competition is good but with everyone wanting to start an mvno the market is pretty flooded. You have to offer something unique to compete.

And failing mvnos are really bad for the industry. Lack of trust will send people running back to postpaid.

Sorry it didn't work out for him. Tough business to be in.

We're waiting for Chelle to open up her mvno! "Chelle-phone" would be an instant hit. Hopeful that the rewards program includes a way to taste some of that southern cookin' she spoke of.

As long as she doesn't call it Chellenuvo!

Mobile Now is now shut down. So another Sprint connected business has abruptly ended. No longer employed employees said something about a money laundering scheme being the coup de gras, rumor or not.
“All Mobile Now retail locations will be closed as of April 1, 2019.” This comes from a memo obtained by NWIDA, which lays out a message from Henry Ching (Executive Vice President and Co-Founder of Simply Wireless) to Mobile Now employees nationwide. The memo goes on to explain, “certain contracts between Mobile Now and Sprint have ended suddenly.”

https://www.prepaidphonenews.com/2019/04/best-cellular-waiving-activation-fees.html

The information on the Mobile Now shutdown is confusing to me. Although some comments in the linked articles imply that Moble Now was a Sprint MVNO, that isn't really clear.

From the Bestcellular link:
"The company has been around since 1997 and ran over 100 Sprint stores under the Mobile Now brand. According to their LinkedIn profile, the company has in total between 500 and 1,000 employees. Their other brands include Simply Prepaid (a multi-carrier provider), Shop Cell Deals (a dedicated web store for wireless deals), and Wireless Partners (a wireless vendor and distribution partner)."

So it appears that MobileNow may have been a Sprint franchise store owner, not an MVNO. Simply Prepaid sounds like an MVNO from that brief mention, but is almost impossible to google, since the name is the same as that used by T-Mobile's in-house prepaid division.
One of the other entities mentioned above may be familiar to long-time Tracfone users. ShopCellDeals used to be one the biggest authorized Tracfone Group resellers, until they got into an apparent tiff with Tracfone for allegedly breaking up Tracfone promotional bundles and selling the phones & refill cards separately. I don't know whether MobileNow's parent company owned ShopCellDeals at that time, or bought them later. ShopCellDeals now seems to be primarily a discount retailer of Sprint- subsidiary devices. (For Boost, Virgin Mobile, etc.)

Simply Prepaid:

April 2015:

March 2016:

@KentE
I wasn't sure about the contents of the article vis-a-vis MVNOs and how they are defined, and I probably should have created a new thread. But I thought the closing down of another company who had contracted with Sprint was close enough.

All is good, and I think it belongs here, too-- you didn't identify Mobile Now as an MVNO at all-- it was the linked articles that had some references implying it was. I['m not sure that I understand Best Cellular's offer to help displaced customers port lines, either-- as a Sprint franchise store operation, it seems like the customer lines would be held by Sprint directly after the sale, so the only loss might have been a convenient place to make a payment on Sprint prepaid brands?

Thanks, st3fx, for the links, and especially the archived peeks. It also doesn't seem like Simply Prepaid was an MVNO during that time range, but a franchised retail reseller of other providers. The "multi-carrier" designation doesn't seem applicable anymore either, since the current website only markets Boost Mobile service. (I've never been in this market, but I think the retail resellers are paid a sign-up bonus, and a markup on refill cards, etc.)