mobile-hotspot
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The Little Carrier That Wired the Mountains for 35 Years - and Then Sold the Signal to Verizon
For 35 years a homegrown carrier from Wilkesboro put bars on the map where the big networks saw only blank terrain. In 2026 it agreed to hand the signal to Verizon - a small-carrier story about who actually pays to cover a mountain.
Cricket Wireless
Cricket built a national wireless business around a modest promise: the bill should not be the month's biggest surprise. Backed by AT&T's network, it now pairs prepaid discipline with the phones, perks and retail reach of a much larger carrier.
SIMO
SIMO is a San Francisco mobile-connectivity company whose patented virtual SIM (vSIM) lets devices roam across 300+ carriers in 140+ countries with no physical SIM card. Founded in 2009 as Skyroam, it now powers the Solis line of pocket hotspots for consumers and an embedded chipset/cloud platform used by enterprises, automakers and IoT fleets.