The Ting mobile reseller opportunity
We announced some exciting news today, the public launch of Ting, our US mobile service. We have talked about Ting in the past, both here and other places so if you have no idea what I am talking about maybe take a quick look here first.
I wanted to let you know some more about this and especially about how this fits in with OpenSRS and resellers.
Tucows has always been, at its core, focused on being the best supplier of Internet services to service providers around the world. We have approached Ting with that thinking in mind.
We have just completed a closed beta with a couple hundred participants. Over 80% of them were resellers. The closed beta was a great success in that we all learned a lot and there was a great spirit in the group with resellers bringing themselves to the beta as customers BUT keeping well aware that they may be offering the service to their customers one day. This made for a really productive process.
Over the next couple of months, we are going to continue refine the retail Ting experience – from purchase path to fulfillment to customer support. Meanwhile, we would like to start speaking with you now about the reseller opportunity. We would like you to help us design the best wholesale offering possible. We are also looking for a handful of you to participate in a reseller beta and be the first to offer Ting to your customers.
It is worth noting that the primary reason that Sprint has been so supportive of us in bringing this to market is that they share our view that you guys are fantastic distribution partners and together we bring an approach to the market that recognizes that mobile has moved from a phone and voice business to being about small computers connecting to a mobile data network.
Some of you have heard me say that this looks and smells to me just like the early days of the ISP business, which many of us lived through. And that means opportunity.
We have set up a simple form on the site for you to fill out if you are interested in partnering with us on Ting. We will follow up shortly with more information.
Please also indicate if you might be interested in a special discount on Ting for yourselves or your employees. We figure the best way to get you and your team excited about offering this to your customers is to get you to experience the service yourselves. It is also a great way to thank you for all the rest of the business you do with OpenSRS.
It is a big day for us here. We well know that Ting will not succeed to the extent it can without your partnership.
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