Todd Allcock wrote:
> At 29 Apr 2008 18:30:53 -0700 SMS wrote:
>
>> How do you figure that? Of course there are acquisition costs. The
>> prepaid phones are sold at below cost, and there are still marketing
>> and advertising expenses.
>
>
> All of which are bourne by the MVNO- not the underlying carrier. The MVNO
> buys airtime "in bulk" at wholesale cost. Given that the airtime itself
> has essentially no cost (since the infrastructure is already in place and
> does no one any good when idle) it's essentially pure profit.

Right, but a lot of the AT&T prepaid users are actually on AT&T's own
prepaid service, which is widely sold at big box retailers.