Singapore's Circle.Life Launches 4th Mobile Service

For consumers, Singapore is among the best-endowed communications markets in Asia. Prices are highly competitive and bandwidth is abundant. But we are now about to see whether such a market will make room for a fourth competitor in the mobile business, albeit a mobile virtual network operator Circles.Life.

Circles.Life is built on the M1 network, and will compete in the postpaid mobile  business. Quite often, MVNOs compete primarily on price. That might not be the case for Circles.Life, which seems to be banking on customization, as well as robust abilities to manage accounts directly from an app.

Where most service providers provide plans that vary data plans by gigabytes, Circles.Life will allow additional usage increments as small as 100 Mbytes.

So “flexibility” appears to be the draw, not “value” in the sense of lowest price.

The last effort to create an MVNO in Singapore was Virgin Mobile, back in 2002, an experiment that lasted less than a year.

So we will have to wait and see whether Circles.Life can do better targeting potentially the same audience as did Virgin Mobile: younger consumers.

What is new: Circles.Life is competing in a market where carrier voice and messaging are not the big draw. Instead, it is mobile data which is most important, so Circles.Life seems to be banking on its potential customers wanting to spend less on carrier voice and messaging and more on mobile data.