SMART Communications Inc. is aggressively pushing its flexible and affordable mobile phone services that cater to the prepaid cellular market as it relaunched yesterday Red Mobile, the cellular brand of Connectivity Unlimited Resource Enterprises Inc. (Cure), a 3G (third-generation) firm acquired in April last year P419.54 million.

“The market is beckoning for more of what we are already offering out there via Smart Buddy and Talk ‘N Txt. We are continuously innovating our core mainstream services, which are voice and text. We have done a lot of slicing and dicing for text and we are doing the same thing to voice. Today, we are further slicing and di-cing the voice services. The lowest per minute call rate has now been reloaded,” said Danilo Mojica, Smart wireless consumer division chief during yesterday’s press conference.

Red Mobile, formerly known as ümobile, was limited to 3G handset use when it was launched last year. It competed with other mobile phone firms by giving out free load credits to subscribers who receive advertisements via their handsets. Though unique, its ad-funded mobile platform approach, however, was not successful.

“Consumers crave for wider coverage so we opened up Smart’s 2G network on Red Mobile. Now, they can enjoy better coverage that works on both 2G and 3G networks,” said Smart department head for Red Mobile Guido Zaballero.

Now, Red Mobile is expanding its cellular service by allowing the use of 2G handsets so that more subscribers can avail of its P0.50 per minute rate on Red-to-Red voice, video calls, and text messaging services. Subscribers just need to top up P30 worth of load to avail of the lowest call rate in the country. Red Mobile also offers P50 up to P500 worth of prepaid load.

Calls to other networks, including Smart, remain at P6.50 per minute, while SMS (short message service) sent to other networks costs P1 per send.

From a branding perspective, Smart chief wireless advisor Orlando Vea said Red Mobile is similar to Smart Buddy and Talk ‘N Txt but each one addresses a particular market segment.

“Smart’s subscriber base is larger than Talk ‘N Txt, while the latter is more geared towards the mass market. For Red Mobile, we are targeting the youth who would prefer to call rather than text and wants to consume their load up to the last centavo,” said Vea.

Red Mobile is targeting to register 1 million subscribers this year, said Zaballero. It now has 100,000 subscribers at an average revenue per user (ARPU) of P100. “We hope that with Red Mobile’s expanded service offerings, our ARPU will also grow,” Zaballero added.

Since Red Mobile rides on the network of Smart, subscribers are assured that there would be no network congestion. Vea said Smart, which has 8, 477 cellular sites nationwide, builds its network ahead of requirements.

Smart earlier said it intends to directly invest up to P210 million in Cure, in the form of subscriptions for new shares of Cure. The fresh funds will be used by Cure for working capital purposes.