Jupiter: MVNO Targets Very Rich/Very Stupid Demographic

Joseph Laszlo posts about high-end MVNOs and their potential target audience at the Jupiter Analyst Weblogs. Laszlo specifically references VOCE, which is targeting a very high-end demographic. He states "a $1,500 entry fee just to sign on will certainly keep the riff-raff out, and a $500 monthly fee for unlimited usage will keep the intelligent wireless subscribers away, too."

Laszlo notes VOCE will run on Cingular's network and remarks "what might be interesting would be if Cingular was willing to set things up so that VOCE customers got call priority, and were quantifiably less likely to have calls drop, and quantifiably got better voice quality out of the network. Then it might actually be worth having. But I can't see Cingular being terribly likely to do this, and there's nothing in the release about better quality of service."

He doesn't see much value add from VOCE's services at this moment and concludes

the rich-and-stupid audience segment is not a bad one. They're out there, and VOCE doesn't need to convince many of 'em that "more expensive=better" to have a very viable business model. I wish them luck at that.