Amp'd pulls out the stops

US MVNO Amp’d Mobile may have surprised some industry watchers on Monday when it reported that its subscriber base has broken the 100,000 barrier, after signing up 70,000 users in the fourth quarter.

Another surprise was that 89 per cent of the service provider’s subscriber base is on postpaid contracts and the company is benefiting from heavy data usage.

Average content and data revenue per user (ARPU) exceeded $30 per month and total ARPU topped $100 per month.

Amp’d said that content accounts for nearly 60 per cent of the $30 of data ARPU, with Amp’d original content accounting for 39 per cent of video downloads.

Subscribers to the MVNO have now downloaded or streamed more than 2 million paid for videos and more than 1 million paid songs, music videos, and radio streams.

Tammy Parker, principal analyst for North America at Informa Telecoms & Media acknowledges that Amp’d is indeed showing momentum, particularly in the areas of data ARPU and overall ARPU.

“But it remains to be seen, however, whether that momentum will continue once Amp’d gets past the very early adopters,” Parker said, adding that the company’s cost of subscriber acquisition “must be astronomical at this point”.

Parker believes that the main reason for the company’s recent success is that the company has successfully ramped up its distribution strategy. “Distribution was a huge problem early on for the firm when it was trying to get its ducks in a row,” she said.