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So CTIA 2008 has officially come to an end. It was an enormous, comprehensive show. I learned a ton from it, both from the seminars they offered and from talking to people at various booths among both of the massive expo floors. What I didn’t see, though, was a ton of prepaid-related stuff. I did meet with the folks from Leap Wireless, who were kind and informative, as always. But overall, I was left wondering where the prepaid representation was.

Most carriers didn’t have exhibition booths, which makes enough sense. Unless they had a new line of handsets, it didn’t make a ton of sense. However, I also noticed that many didn’t even have meeting rooms.

Beyond Leap, there was U.S. Cellular and AT&T Mobility. I didn’t see anything for MetroPCS or Alltel, which was particularly disappointing. Virgin Mobile supplied speakers in founder Richard Branson and CEO Dan Schulman. But I couldn’t find other representatives from their company. Boost Mobile was seemingly absent as well.

Of course, those carriers could have had representatives there, and I just missed them. There were thousands and thousands of people roaming around over the course of the three days, and absent a booth it was tough to track anyone down.

ZTE did have a booth, though, fresh with two new handsets, presumably targeted at prepaid. If you’ll remember back a little over a month ago, they debuted the C88 on MetroPCS.

There were also tons of services that are perfectly matched for prepaid. I’ll get to a number of them over the next few months. Of particular interest to prepaid users is Myscreen Mobile, an advertising service which we talked about last year. You legitimately get paid for advertising, which can snip your monthly bill.

Overall, the show was excellent. I met a ton of people who left me with nothing but an optimistic vision of the cellular future. And I have little doubt that despite the country’s economic downturn, prepaid will continue to thrive.

Posted By : Joe
Posted at : April 4th, 2008 - 7:33 am
Filed under : Prepaid Services