The "What happened at CellNUVO" speculation thread

Fluidcall was never reliable for me. Lots of missed incoming calls. Ended up spending $20 to port a line out to Google Voice to get reliability.

That, together with missing voicemails was not worth the free side of things during a month where I had some important things going on.

Apart from that, I got good value out of RingPus on the data side of things without risking much. Didn't have a latency issue on phone calls.

But all up, the experience with freedompop has been better - and cheaper - than RingPus. And now that Xfinity has unlimited talk and text on Verizon, there is an option there if real cell calls are important. If you can get a dual sim phone or a dual sim adapter to work, or just carry two devices, Xfinity + freedompop is a better value and service than RingPus ever was.

Anyhow, as the person who started this thread about speculating what is going on at CellNUVO, let's get back to the topic!

Here is my theory about CellNUVO.

The company is really small and essentially does only one thing which is solicit companies to place ads on their platform. All substantive operational activities are outsourced and there is very little technical knowledge at the company about the mechanics of managing device issues.

Sometime around the beginning of June something major happened and there was a big change in the rate of credit earnings. Around the middle of August some type of crisis arose as evidenced by the fact the website went down which means there were no new activations. That was flagged by one poster here days before the outage. Typically, the implies the carrier, Sprint, has declined new activations.

As some type of interim solution the company prefunded some limited service on Red Pocket with new temporary numbers.

All the MEIDs and ICCIDs were released and most of them (anyone who has service was migrated to Red Pocket).

Since then there has really been no significant news.

The only official statement from Tom Mannix was two weeks ago today and what was really interesting about it was what it did not say.

There could be a good reason for the silence but, even if there is, the public relations aspect of failing to provide any information to users is extremely damaging and may be impossible to erase even if somehow a way forward is found.

Once this type of situation happens, the story spreads all over the Internet.

Realistically, while the outage, although extreme in terms of duration, might not entirely erode confidence, it certainly make it clear that CellNUVO cannot be relied upon for any critical communication need. Once that is recognized then, the service is necessarily limited to being a backup resource which of course makes it interesting only to a very small group of potential users.

Typically these types of problem reflect financial strains. As it is a private company there is no way to know what the actual situation might be since there are no audited accounts to review.

My own reservation about the business model is not with the earning of credits. It is rather the number of times a user is able to earn credit for the same ad. I simply do not see how that can make sense from the perspective of the ad sponsor.

Does anybody think the service interruption is anything to do with Kajeet?

Maybe CN sold the accounts to Red Pocket just like Ring+ to Ting...we just don't it know yet. And it's up to Red Pocket to retain as many customers as they can.

Or maybe everything is moving forward as CN planned. They just want to surprise us.

if they sold my account to Red Pocket, they better give me all the Ads credit or gave me back all the time that was wasted swiping ads.

Well, I had well over $150 in top-ups and sign-ups fees with Ring+ for various lines that we used for only a few weeks before they went belly up. Never got that back. I was late to the Ring+ game so never benefited from their earlier years.

Don't know. I found that they have discontinued their phone service as of Aug 23, moving that to TPO mobile.

I don't think there is anything really mysterious going on. We are missing some minor details and a timeline but know the main things or can have a good idea about most.

The carrier partner went out of business and cellnuvo had to quickly find a replacement. They chose redpocket because it was part of their strategy to branch out to GSM anyway. Now if they had chosen someone like Ting with extensive experience of taking over accounts from failing mvnos then things would have run more smoothly/quickly and we would probably be back to normal by now. However things would have gotten a lot more expensive. Someone like Ting may have insisted on dropping the ad part of the business as well or probably just handing over the accounts. But redpocket seem open to this kind of arrangement.

I don't think cellnuvo is really an MVNO like we all thought. They seem like a middle man that brings together the ad partners and the cell provider and has developed an app and systems to link it altogether.

Right now we are waiting on redpocket and cellnuvo to finish linking all the accounts and numbers together, hashing out any remaining contractual details (since it was done quickly I imagine there are loose ends to sort out) and then making sure everything is in sync. It will probably take a little longer than we want but they will get there in the end. Numbers are supposed to be coming back shortly after this holiday weekend according to customer service.

For me I am glad they chose redpocket so that we will have more options with low cost. I am also happy that cellnuvo were able to find a partner so quickly so that they didn't simply end up out of business. I know we would all like more communication and we would all like things fixed straight away but I am thinking that Cellnuvo made something good come out of a very bad situation and will get us all back up and running as soon as they can.

Maybe it was kajeet as that was the only mvno failure that I can remember in the past couple of months. They ended in late August and were sprint. Timeline fits.

Kajeet announced their last day (I think Aug 23), a couple of months ago.

I think that they are not directly contracting with ad providers but are using a couple of 3rd parties eg tapjoy. This 3rd party is likely to have multiple customers and is delivering the same ads over the same system to all. I don't think that the brand partner paying for users to view ads will be fed data about individual users and how many times they watch the same ad but rather would be paying for a certain number of ads played by the 3rd party.

A lot of these ad providers seem really odd but remain in business. For example Perk lets you earn points by running videos continuously 24/7 with ads every x number of videos. People have made "farms" of 10 cheap phones to run these videos constantly. They probably don't even watch any videos or ads other than the mandatory click to say they are still watching every couple of hours. That is far worse than this situation as we all have to click several times to watch ads and actually view them.

Plus at the end of the day the advertisers would like for us to see their ad over and over. It helps it to stick in the mind. If I say chocolate bar how many think snickers?! If you think of a job how many will say coastguard!

" I don't think that the ad partner will be fed data about individual users and how many times they watch the same ad but rather would be paying for a certain number of views with the 3rd party."

You may be right and I hope you are because if that is the case it changes things for the better.

Here is why I have doubts:

  1. given the influx of new users since February and the amounts of credits being earned, CellNUVO obviously saw a huge boost in revenue. The other side of the coin is that ad sponsors either saw their budgets run down at an abnormal rate if they had prepaid or the amount they were invoiced rose sharply if it on a postpaid basis. Whoever is managing the ad program at these companies had to understand why because it needs to be explained to the next level up otherwise that person's job is at risk.

  2. all ad sponsors use metrics in placing and assessing ads. One of the most critical metrics is the number of viewers per instance. Since higher is better sponsors want to know for each channel how many viewers per $1 spent as that influences allocations across channels. So if sponsors were not monitoring average viewers per instance that would be very unusual. For channels such as CellNUVO it is very easy to calculate because the information is available on a per account basis. That is not at the case for channels such as TV, Radio, Media (including Social Media).

All of this would happen whether CellNUVO was managing it by itself or was using a third party.

I'm thinking with #2 that the ad sponsor is getting info collectively from the one delivering the ads eg tapjoy. It pays tapjoy and not all of tapjoy's customers. Say tapjoy has 10 customers it lets use its ad delivery system. I would imagine that tapjoy would report to the sponsor collectively rather than breaking it down by its own ten customers separately to the ad sponsor. There could be privacy, contractual or commercial reasons to keep that from the sponsor. The sponsor would then be able to compare its tv ads to its mobile tapjoy ads to its magazine ads etc. I would be surprised if they had data as granular as what you are thinking but I could be totally wrong.

#1 could be explained by the many dry patches we have experienced from time to time.

All just speculation here but then this is a speculation thread.

I think the real lesson here, as was the case on Social, that all of us instead of managing fantasy football teams seem to like managing fantasy MVNOs since we never actually have the information needed to really know what is happening in the ones we are discussing.:slight_smile:

So I guess for now the most plausible theories are the two from the OP.

The most plausible theory is the second post in this thread!

I concur.

Post #10000 was greater than even I realized at the time.

:stuck_out_tongue:

Just make sure your post #1000 is a good one, unlike the previous 999.

Kidding. :whistle:

I do not think so and here is why.

Many museums offer same day tickets in limited quantities starting at a certain time and anyone can compete for one and pass it on to a friend. From time to time I participate in this activity with friends in an effort to maximize the chances that whoever actually is going to the museum gets a ticket. We all log in on multiple devices and refresh like crazy until we get lucky or there are no more tickets (usually the latter). If ever we score more than the number of tickets needed those going to the museum distribute them to someone standing in line for standby admission so no ticket is wasted.

The point of this is that if OP was attempting to hit the jackpot, it would not have been a long post. Instead OP would have been posting (perhaps with an army of friends) repeatedly in multiple threads with simple questions like "any developments?"

25,000 is the next major milestone and if CellNUVO rolls out a new platform and other goodies, there is an outside chance we could hit that mark by Thanksgiving.

So anyone looking for the title, has plenty of time to devise and test an optimal strategy (preferably by testing on some other forums than here).

Hmm, Still silent B)

Come on Karl, I need to refill my account..no data :angry:

Perhaps what is going on is the same thing that some of us thought was happening on Social. We are part of a well-funded research project and are been fed a steady diet of misinformation, rumor, and the rare piece of factual information. It is the funding from the research that actually pays for the service.

The latest test is seeing how long people can go without actually paying Red Pocket to refill the account.

The sooner someone breaks and pays up, the sooner everyone will be refilled free.

Want to be the hero?