Business Line Resellers

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Business line resellers offer cellular service by reselling network operators’ business phone lines. While business line resellers often get called mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs), there’s a technical sense in which business line resellers are a distinct business form.

Business line resellers may require potential customers to submit documentation to verify a business’s existence before activating service. In the United States, business line resellers have a history of abruptly going out of business or ceasing to activate new lines.1 Here’s how Dennis Bournique describes business resellers (BRs):

Although they tend to offer good value, the BRs have a major downside, they tend to go out of business quickly and with little warning. I’m not sure why that’s the case, but the lack of verification [of businesses] is probably one reason. There’s also evidence that at least some of the failed BRs were opening large multi-line business accounts and reselling the separate lines to individuals. I suspect that’s not allowed by the reseller’s contract with the mobile operator.

Dennis Bournique shares an overview of the history of several business line resellers that no longer operate in an article from 2016.

Footnotes

  1. Teltik was a reasonably prominent business line reseller before transitioning to an MVNO model after going through some issues. The owners of Teltik also owned at least two other business line resellers that no longer operate, Venn Mobile and Harbor Mobile.