Growth
In 2008, we leveraged our low-cost structure to achieve significant growth in three areas – our existing business, new markets and new product offerings. With this growth strategy, we are continuing to increase our footprint, customer penetration and awareness in the marketplace.
In our existing markets, we increased penetration by improving our footprint, enhancing our retail distribution and raising consumer awareness of our products. We also achieved strong customer uptake in our newest markets after launching approximately 11 million new covered POPs in 2008. We ended the year with a footprint covering approximately 67.2 million POPs.
In addition, we launched two new products to augment the success of our flagship Cricket Wireless service. Cricket Broadband, our unlimited high-speed mobile broadband service, gives us an opportunity to widen our appeal and gain new Cricket Wireless customers over time. We also began an introductory launch of Cricket PAYGo, our unlimited prepaid wireless service. We continue to evaluate the early results of this product and its potential to extend our reach in the prepaid market as well as to capture new opportunities to create value for our business at attractive operating margins.