- Gigs developed an operating system for provisioning mobile services – and not in the traditional MVNO fashion
- Gigs’ recent partnership with AT&T embeds mobile service directly into consumer apps
- The partnership marks a shift in how carriers distribute – and brand – connectivity
Move over, MVNOs. There’s a new game in town – one that lets consumers get their mobile phone service through an app.
It’s all enabled by Gigs, a 5-year-old company whose founders set out to right some wrongs in the telecom industry and in the process, they’re upending how consumers get their phone service. That’s how it appears to this author, anyway.
Let’s start at the beginning. As Gigs co-founder and CEO Hermann Frank explained it, a few years ago the company’s founders sized up what was happening in the payments industry, with companies like Stripe providing financial services through application programming interfaces (APIs). They thought the same level of automatic provisioning should be available for buying cell phone service – but it wasn’t.
So, they set out to change that.
“This is how we started Gigs – by thinking we could create the most direct way to distribute connectivity through existing user bases and technology platforms,” Frank told Fierce.
Gigs: Not an MVNE
What Gigs is doing looks a lot like a mobile virtual network enabler (MVNE) because they enable what we’ve come to know as MVNOs, or mobile virtual network operators, that use the facilities-based carriers’ networks to deliver mobile service under their own brands, like SmartLess Wireless or Trump Mobile.
But Gigs doesn’t want to be called an MVNE because they do so much more than that – kind of an MVNE on steroids.
Basically, Gigs takes care of all the licensing, tax provisioning and associated tasks that are typically the responsibilities of the MVNO/MVNE. It’s partnering with fintech brands like Klarna, the buy-now-pay-later service that already serves millions of users. Klarna’s deal with Gigs allows it to sell unlimited 5G data, talk and text plans to its customers for $40/month – all within the Klarna app.
What’s the big Gigs deal?
Last month, Gigs made headlines when it announced a deal with AT&T to redefine how AT&T delivers connectivity to consumers. It’s a deviation from the usual MVNO relationship in a lot of ways, one where AT&T is not hiding the fact that it’s the network powering the services enabled by Gigs.
For many years it’s been standard operating procedure for mobile network operators (MNOs) to forbid their MVNO partners from disclosing who’s providing the network unless they get express approval. One reason is the MNO doesn’t want consumers to know they can get access to the same network for a cheaper price.
Now, AT&T is changing that via its Gigs partnership. With Gigs service, the brand’s name can appear in the top left corner of the device screen, which is usually reserved for the MNO.
Both companies describe the collaboration as more than the typical wholesale deal.
“Our partnership with AT&T is without precedent in both scale and depth of integration," Frank said. “It enables major U.S. consumer apps to market plans under the AT&T brand while also giving them the ability to operate under their own service provider name.”
According to Frank, Gigs’ deal with AT&T signifies almost two years of work that was put into creating a one-of-a-kind platform to power modern technology businesses.
“Every single aspect of the service has been rethought from the ground up,” he said. “Not only are we combining AT&T’s leading network with Gigs’ market leading operating system for mobile services, but both companies actually designed the product delivered specifically with the needs of the target demographic in mind – a full feature set.”
For example, they’re offering “truly unlimited plans” to resellers – no asterisk and no throttling after 30 GB. “They stay fast,” he said. “The plans have a full feature set available on the network: Priority data (QC1 8), hotspot, roaming to Mexico and Canada, HD streaming.”
Asked how AT&T’s deal with Gigs is different from other MVNE agreements, AT&T’s VP of Emerging Business – Platforms & Partnerships William Traylor declined to summarize or compare agreements. But he said Gigs has proven to be an “innovative enabler” that pushes the boundaries of what’s possible for platform providers today.
“Gigs is helping us reimagine what telecom can be and what matters most to consumers,” he said. “By working together, we’re closing technology gaps and ensuring more people have access to the services they need, especially those who may not have had that chance in the past.”
Gigs’ carrier agnostic model
Frank clarified that none of Gigs’ partnerships with the carriers are exclusive. In the U.S., AT&T is Gigs’ anchor partner on this, but Gigs also has an agreement to use T-Mobile’s 5G network. T-Mobile, meanwhile, last year launched its own “Your Name, Our Wireless” program for MVNOs.
“Our model is carrier agnostic to ensure customers can access the best possible coverage and scale,” Frank said.
Frank founded Gigs with his business partner, Dennis Bauer. In an interview this past summer, Frank told Fierce how they set out to bring innovation to the telecom space because nothing truly innovative happened since the 1990s, when times were good and “everybody became a billionaire.”
Indeed, we remember that time, and there were a lot of people getting rich off wireless. (Sadly, we were not one of them.)
Gigs is heading into its sixth year. They’ve already done a lot in a relatively short time, but Frank said they’re not nearly done. “There’s still a lot of work to do,” he said. “There’s a lot of problems to fix in telecom.”