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We recently wrote about the Mobile Virtual Network Operators under the heading, “are all US MVNOs doomed to fail”, well perhaps yes, but that is not stopping new entrants.

Late last week Amp’d mobile, a US MVNO, filed for bankruptcy and today formally released a statement that “our back-end infrastructure was unable to keep up with customer demand”!

Early mid May we also reported about Qualcomm launching a MVNO focussed on the healthcare market called Lifecomm (incidently, Qualcomm is also an investor in Amp’d). Now just a fews weeks later another two MVNOs are launching, this time in Italy. Carrefour a supermarket chain will launch UnoMobile, and the Italian Postal Operator Poste Italiane will also launch, both using the Vodafone network for access.

Carrefour has already launched MVNOs in Spain last October, and in France the month after. They must have a good feeling about the MVNO operator model to continue the expansion. The Carrefour group has over 1500 stores and employs over 26,000 staff in Italy (2006 annual report). At a minimum they could make getting a company mobile compulsary to get things off the ground!

Poste Italian has over 14,000 post offices, and according to Vodafone will be the worlds first postal service to operate in the mobile telephony sector.

- Richard T