The Denver Tech Center has become the operations hub for Cricket Communications, a small but fast-growing niche wireless carrier.
Over the past year, the company has beefed up its metro-area workforce from fewer than 100 to more than 200. One of the company’s highest-ranking executives, chief marketing officer Al Moschner, is now based at Cricket’s DTC office. Moschner oversees roughly three-quarters of the company’s 2,000 employees nationwide.
“Denver is the operating headquarters where all of the field sales and marketing operations emanates from,” Moschner said last week.
Cricket is an operating unit of San Diego-based Leap Wireless International.
“It became clear about a year ago … that as we continue to grow, San Diego was probably not the best geographic place for the field organization to be headquartered,” Moschner said. “Denver was a logical choice for several reasons.”
Moschner noted the area’s pool of skilled labor, a large airline hub at Denver International Airport and Cricket’s footprint in the state.
Cricket’s network covers more than 80 percent of Colorado, one of the company’s largest service territories. The company is currently expanding the network with the goal of covering 98 percent of the state by the middle of 2008, Moschner said.
“A lot of the mountain area that today Cricket coverage doesn’t reach will get reached with this additional build-out,” he said.
Leap, which offers wireless service under the Cricket and Jump Mobile brands, has 2.6 million customers nationwide. Jump offers prepaid service, and Cricket offers month-to-month service, with plans that feature unlimited calling and text messaging.
Unlike larger cellphone carriers such as Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile, Cricket doesn’t require credit checks or long-term contracts.
As such, the company’s churn, or rate of subscriber turnover, is higher than traditional wireless carriers, said Donna Jaegers, a telecommunications analyst with Janco Partners. “They have higher churn because they are dealing usually with people that are more credit challenged,” she said.
During the first quarter, Leap had a churn rate of 3.4 percent, up from 3.3 percent during the same quarter a year ago. In comparison, Verizon Wireless’ churn rate was 1.08 percent during the first quarter.
Though Jaegers said she has long been a skeptic, there is growing optimism about Cricket’s business model because of the success of MetroPCS, a company with a similar approach that has been able to win customers in larger U.S. markets.
“The hope is that Cricket might combine with MetroPCS to have a bigger footprint,” Jaegers said.
Cricket, however, is in growth mode. Over the past 18 months, the company doubled its reach, expanding to 14 new markets, Moschner said. The company plans to continue to enter new markets, such as Chicago, Las Vegas and Minneapolis, over the next two years.
Staff writer Andy Vuong can be reached at 303-954-1209 or avuong@denverpost.com.
