Many mobile phone companies across the world use the brand name of Virgin Mobile. The countries include Canada, United States, United Kingdom, France, India, Australia and South Africa. The brand was not widely accepted in Singapore and did not do well. The Virgin Mobile branded companies across the world each operates differently as an independent business entity, but acceptably, in partnership between the business and the Virgin Group that is owned by Sir Richard Branson. Virgin Group avails the brand and the phone business controls the infrastructure of the network.
Virgin Mobile was first launched in 1999 in the United Kingdom. It was the 1st virtual mobile network operator to be launched. Currently, Virgin Mobile does not operate its own network, but contracts instead, to utilise the existing networks of other international mobile providers. In the different providers in the world, the brand Virgin Mobile takes on different names of the network it is using. In the United Kingdom, it uses the T-Mobile network. In the United States, the carrier network is Sprint Nextel. Optus is the network that Virgin Mobile operates in Australia. In Canada, the carrier network is Bell Mobility. In France, the network is Orange SA. In South Africa, it uses Cell C, the network that covers the country while Virgin Mobile India works with the Tata Indicom network.
In all the countries, Virgin Mobile offers a prepaid service, more commonly known as ‘pay as you go’ service. However, all the networks utilise either of the two different standards of mobile telephony which are GSM and CDMA. UK, France, Australia and South Africa use GSM while the US, Canada and India utilise CDMA.