A startup flat-rate wireless provider out of Texas may have San Diego’s Leap Wireless (NASDAQ:[[ticker:LEAP]]) in its sites.
Pocket Communications, a no-frills wireless service provider in San Antonio, announced today it has raised $100 million in venture funding to establish a broad footprint for its unlimited wireless service in the Northeast. Xconomy’s Wade Roush provides details on the financing here.
Leap’s Cricket has been competing against Pocket for nearly three years in the San Antonio area, where Pocket says it has become Texas’ fastest-growing flat-rate wireless company, with more than 250,000 subscribers. Cricket is in 11 other Texas communities, including Austin, College Station and Houston.
With its latest buildout, Pocket plans to provide its wireless services in a broad corridor that includes Hartford and New Haven, CT, Springfield and Pittsfield, MA and Poughkeepsie, NY. Leap’s Cricket is established in the New York cities of Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse, but the company has no presence in Massachusetts or Connecticut.
Comments by Matt Niehaus of Battery Ventures, the Boston venture firm that lead Pocket’s $100 million in financing, suggest that Pocket plans to create broader corridors for its networks than Leap’s strategy of providing service in discrete cities.
Perhaps more importantly, Pocket’s founder and CEO Paul Posner told GigaOm he can undercut rivals Leap and MetroPCS on pricing and still make a profit.
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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