At 29 Apr 2008 22:42:02 -0700 SMS wrote:

> > 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.

Last figures I saw (early 2007) said there were roughly 3 million GoPhone
customers, and 2.4 million Verizon InPulse customers, numbers close enough
to make bottom-line advantages/disadvantages immaterial. (Just for
completeness, there were also 3 million T-Mo prepaid, and 21 million MVNO
customers across all carriers.)

You were primarily talking about the wholesale (MVNO) customers dragging
down AT&T's numbers...