Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Mobilz Becomes Cross Wireless

The Cross Telephone Company in eastern Oklahoma may have gotten a little too creative with their wireless service when they rolled out "Mobilz".  When you're a tiny rural phone operation, your wireless arm needs to support, not distract from, the main wireline/DSL/TV operation. So Cross wisely renamed their service to "Cross Wireless".  The cellular operation is small enough that when we call the helpful people there they have no idea that we are not seeking information about their wireless home Internet service.

Not to further confuse things, Cross also owns Sprocket Wireless which serves the area "a little farther out" from the Cross Wireless coverage area.  While Sprocket is a slightly more familiar name in that area east of Tulsa, it would be smart to further consolidate to just one name for their cellular operations.  The main reason to do so in larger markets is to get more bang for your marketing money, but in the smallest markets, there just might not be any.

In New Mexico, Leaco Rural Telephone Cooperative changed their cellular service to "NMobile", due to confusion over the "Leaco" name being limited to Lea County.  In central Texas, Mid-Tex Wireless finally assigned their acquired Five Star Wireless name to their wireless Internet service instead of having cellular stores with different names.  However. they also offer prepaid service under the Right Wireless name, so they still found a way to diffuse their marketing efforts.  At least in Oklahoma, consolidation makes sense without losing any more wireless carriers.

1 comment:

Faith Baptist Church said...

Correction on Five Star Wireless: At this point, that brand name is only used as a storefront name in counties that Five Star used to serve (Kendall, Kimble, Kerr, Gillespie). Kind of like how Safeway stores in Texas go by the old Randall's name.

West Central's fixed wireless broadband option (using Airspan pre-LTE equipment if I remember correctly, and delivering speeds comparable with low-tier DSL) is called Net Jet and rides under the West Central banner.