In the absence of well functioning system that provides cellular service, availability of phones and/or Gift Cards to buy for Gold (all promised) - I have an idea!
How about CellNuvo issuing Prepaid Visa Cards, in the amount equivalent to accumulated Gold, to it's subscribers? I'm pretty sure a lot of us would be perfectly satisfied with this solution.
ceka, I think there is nothing wrong with your idea. You can currently redeem gold for high value plans or even use it at paygo rates until you exhaust your balance. That mean that CellNUVO has the dollar equivalent of your gold available to pay to Red Pocket.
Therefore, theoretically speaking, what difference is there in how they pay you out? (Assuming the redemption rate they use across all payout forms is the same).
However, in practice, offering prepaid Visa cards has implementation issues:
CellNUVO does not have many resources (what I call a shoestring operation). Even the act of figuring out how to get hold of Visa prepaid cards, putting them in an online store or dealing with this manually via email, uses up resources that they need to spend elsewhere.
I believe them when they say they want to offer phones for Gold but when will that be? Just like everything else they say they want to or will do, when is the big question. I wouldn't hold out hope of them doing that soon let alone moving onto other redemption options.
In accounting / finance, CellNUVO should have all your and everyone else's Gold on their balance sheet as a liability. However, this does not mean that they have the entire amount of cash available to pay it out. They should be able to, but they are highly likely to be unable to do so in a short timeframe. Usually redemptions take place at a predictable rate so there is only enough cash available for month to month needs.
Now, since they've said they plan to introduce phones, then to some extent they are willing to allow higher value redemptions. But, if they are sensible, they would only make a limited number of phones available at one time because it's highly unlikely that they have the cash to redeem all the gold if that's what people decided. In which case, they would do the same with any other redemption including your prepaid visa card idea.
The last caveat about their financial situation is this. We have no idea how good their financial health is. They say they are profitable and I have reason to believe them on that. A going concern should be able to, over time, redeem all the gold they owe. But we cannot be 100% sure that they are able to do that. You have to trust and believe in them. On the other hand, it is highly possible that a lot of gold has recently been forfeited in which case they could very well have a better balance sheet after the recent problems than before them. We just have no way of knowing.