Sometimes business innovation trumps technology or regulatory innovation. Consider the way innovators can play in the mobile business if they are not one of the fortunate few that own spectrum and national networks.

Zero01, a new mobile service owned by Unified Technologies Group, has gotten justifiable attention for the way it is marrying a broad distribution network with use of unlocked GSM phones and flat-rate, no contract, “data only” service plans. Zero01 plans to announce the commercial launch date of its $69.99 a month service during the CTIA Wireless convention April 1 to 3, 2009.

What has received far less attention is the new way distribution and service plans are married to infrastructure.

In the past, a number of providers have leased wholesale capacity and then tried to retail service, with some added value, with varying degrees of success. The analogy is the way competitive local exchange carriers used to rely on wholesale “unbundled network element-provisioned” (UNE-P).

In that business model, CLECs would buy wholesale, fully provisioned service and then offer it at retail, hopefully making enough margin, in volume, to sustain a business. The strategy, though never easy, worked when wholesale margins were more generous than they are at present.

That’s essentially the same tack mobile virtual network operators took. But Zero01 is not that sort of MVNO. In fact, Zero01 is acting as an interconnecting carrier. The key innovation here is precisely that fact.

Its underlying network services provider, Pervasip, is able, as a carrier, to enter into interconnection agreements. That means Zero01 does not have to buy access to radio ports or voice services as an MVNO might.

Instead, Zero01 simply negotiates interconnection agreements as other carriers do. There are “some subtleties,” says Mark Richards, Pervasip CIO. Essentially, though, it is mostly “a different way of thinking,” a new way of creating radio access to networks.