Amp'd Mobile will close its service and sell its assets.
We've written enough about this company. It is badly run, and so its difficult to draw lessons on what it means for MVNOs, or networks that lease infrastructure from the big carriers. But its difficult to avoid the conclusion they don't work very well. It follows ESPN's MVNO failure last year. The carriers have too much power and little interest in letting upstarts succeed.
That hampers smaller players from innovating. It's one more reason to open up the wireless spectrum, and why AT&T's negative response to Google's proposed criteria for doing so is somewhat preposterous. AT&T's shrill remark that Google should "put up or shut up," and bid on the spectrum under the conservative terms initially proposed, is unaccompanied by any specifics about why Google's more radical plans for opening the spectrum are unreasonable.