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The Amazon Fire phone!
Andrew Cunningham
You buy everything else from Amazon, so why not cell service? A Reuters report says that the retail giant "plans" to buy Sprint MVNO Boost Mobile.
Sprint and T-Mobile are currently in the process of merging. One of the concessions required by the FCC is the sale of Boost Mobile, the low cost prepaid carrier of Sprint. With Boost on sale (for an amount of up to $ 3 billion, according to Reuters), Amazon is obviously considering engaging in cellular activity.
As an MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator), Boost Mobile does not have its own network. Instead, it resells the Sprint network, so that in the future it would still rely on the T-Mobile / Sprint merged network for the service. It appears that Buying Boost provides Amazon with a significant customer base (7 to 8 million people), as well as a six-year license to operate and resell services to the new T-Mobile / Sprint network. Amazon may want to go even further than a simple MVNO operation because the report indicates that Amazon would also be interested in any wireless spectrum that merged companies would need to sell.
Amazon has been touring the cell industry for quite some time. The company builds the Android "Fire OS" fork, which appears regularly on the company's very cheap Kindle Fire tablets. He even made a smartphone once, called Amazon Fire Phone, although it was an incredible flop. Since then, the company has started selling "Prime Exclusive" Android phones, delivered with preloaded Amazon apps.
You might ask yourself, "Why would Amazon want to be a cell operator?" – but Amazon likes to build and sell just about everything. In its early days, the company was "the world's largest bookstore", but today it manufactures tablets, e-readers, set-top boxes, smart speakers, smart screens and voice assistants. There's the Prime Video Netflix competitor, Amazon Drive cloud storage, Twitch.tv video streaming, Whole Foods, Amazon Web Services, broadcast drones, music and eBook sales, shopping retail, plans for the satellite internet and a million other things. For now, cell service is one of the few things that Amazon does not sell.
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