Since launching in 2005, local wireless carrier company Mobi has seen “pretty incredible” growth, vice president for strategy Marcus Mena told Pacific Business News.
“Whenever anyone here asks me where I work and I mention Mobi, you would be amazed at how often I hear: ‘Oh, wow, Mobi was my first cell phone!’” Mena said.
Formerly known as MobiPCS, the company offers a $9.99 plan, which includes unlimited talk and text, as well as 1 gigabite of LTE data. Mobi also sells a range of different phones and has mobile apps that allow prospective customers to try out their service before making the decision to switch, he said.
“Having a great digital customer experience is also, we think, quite important for a small wireless carrier like us to be able to differentiate ourselves versus the big carriers,” he added.
Mobi has 70 employees, most of whom are based in Hawaii, but some are in Canada, Mexico and the U.S. Mainland.
When asked about revenues, Mena said, “It is safe to say that our revenues are a rounding error of a rounding error compared to the big carriers, but that gives us plenty of room to grow.”
What’s new for Mobi? In the first several years after the iPhone launched ... it was a struggle for smaller carriers like us to keep all of our existing customers, let alone grow again. Having such an affordable price point ... it really causes them to stop and take a closer look at Mobi. ... We have migrated our wireless core and key systems to the cloud with [Amazon Web Services], and Amazon has been an incredible partner on that front. Our AWS cloud mobile core is from WG2, a small startup based in Norway that has brought together a really phenomenal team of wireless geeks. We were lucky to be an early customer of theirs, and they were very recently acquired by Cisco — which brings an even bigger ecosystem to the table.
What is the greatest challenge Mobi has faced recently? I believe I can speak for everyone on the team when I say that the pandemic was more challenging than we could have ever imagined. ... Carriers were required to not suspend service if customers were unable to pay, but we had already implemented our own assistance program for our customers prior to that. ... The fires in August, though — I just cannot find words for that. ... Our CEO, Justen Burdette, was there that Wednesday evening, the day after the fires, working to help get the fire station in Lahaina back online. ... Our hope is that we’ll be able to help in some small but meaningful ways as folks begin to be able to rebuild by using some of the things we’re working on around fixed wireless and shared spectrum, but there is still such a long road to recovery for the families there on Maui in the meantime.
What’s on the horizon for Mobi? We’re investing heavily in our mobile apps. ... Our partnership with T-Mobile made the news earlier this year, but that opens up new opportunities for us, as well, both here in Hawaii and on the Mainland. With shared spectrum and small cells, we are working to tackle areas with poor coverage — or no coverage — here in the Islands in a way that is scalable and sustainable, which I think is something that regional carriers are uniquely positioned to help tackle. ... Now, we can offer service just about anywhere on the Mainland ... and we’ve started working on our plans to expand the Mobi brand and the tech stack we’ve built to other countries. ... Those are just the pieces I can talk about right now, but I know the entire team is pretty excited to finally be able to share some additional projects we’ve been working on, [which will be announced this month] at the AWS re:Invent 2023 conference in Las Vegas, and at the Pacific Telecommunications Council PTC ‘24 conference in January in Waikiki.
Mobi
Marcus Mena, vice president for strategy
Address: 1668 S. King St., Suite 101, Honolulu, Hawaii 96826-2074
Phone: 808-723-2097
Website: mobi.com
