Kyle
Rumors are hot and heavy that after the failed AT&T T-Mobile merger, AT&T has it’s eyes set on prepaid wireless carrier Cricket.
Cricket, whose parent company is Leap Wireless, is a steadily growing prepaid carrier with stand alone stores in most major US cities. They also have distribution channels set up at most of the Best Buy’s in the continental United States as well as Walmart and other retailers.
Cricket prides itself on it’s portfolio of both Android smartphones, and smartphones with their proprietary Muve Music service that’s been a hit with their customers. The service allows them unlimited downloads of songs from their cloud based music store to their Cricket Muve Music enabled handsets. The songs can’t be taken off the phone but can be streamed via BlueTooth and of course 3.5mm headset jacks.
The AT&T/T-Mobile merger was all the talk at last years CTIA Mobile Life show in 2011. The announcement about the proposed merger came on Sunday, the eve before CTIA was to kick off. In fact CTIA that year, in Orlando, kicked off with a round table with all four CEOs and moderator Jim Cramer. T-Mobile CEO Phillip Humm backed out of that years appearance because of the merger announcement.
More after the break
This year at CTIA mum was the word on discussions of a merger between AT&T and any company. Although it was widely reported, by AT&T, that they needed to merge with someone to get more spectrum to build out their fourth generation wireless network.
Reuters reported last week that AT&T was in talks with Leap Wireless about a possible acquisition of Cricket. Cricket currently has 5.9 million customers. Reuters cited 3 unnamed sources and was unable to report whether the talks had stalled or if they were ongoing.
In talks over the years with Cricket spokesman Greg Lund, the company is finding more and more that customers are switching to Cricket to manage their monthly spending better. Long gone are the days that fueled companies like TracPhone where customers couldn’t “afford” sometimes pricier on-contract phone plans.
Cricket offers comparable phones to the major four carriers without the worry of overages and other things resulting from postpaid carrier brands. In fact Cricket is the only carrier to offer the Huawei Mercury, Huawei’s best selling smartphone in the US. Rumor has it that they may even see the highly sought after Huawei D-Quad smartphone sometime in the next quarter.
If AT&T were to acquire Cricket it’s unclear what would happen to their prepaid customer base. They may decide to hold onto the prepaid subscribers in the same way that Sprint owns Virgin Mobile USA and Boost Mobile. AT&T offers a prepaid service which isn’t nearly as popular as Sprint’s prepaid brands. Sprint’s two prepaid brands were what brought Sprint over the top and above AT&T in first quarter customer acquisitions in 2012.
Source: TFTS
