ELLY GRIMM
• Leader & Times
Cybersecurity is a hot topic nowadays, especially among Christian families, and soon, Radiant Mobile is set to launch to help with that.
The goal of Radiant Mobile is to be a fusion of faith, technology, and entertainment and create a safer digital environment for families while delivering uplifting content. In partnership with ALLOT, a leading Israeli cybersecurity company, Radiant Mobile’s industry-first network-level protection blocks inappropriate material including pornography, explicit content, gambling, and harmful digital influences directly at the network level. Radiant Mobile will officially launch April 5 (Easter Sunday) with 24 continuous hours of Christ-centered content.
Co-founder Paul Fisher said the idea was sparked a while ago.
“I've worked as a talent agent for multiple years, and Chris has worked in ministry for several years now. I also have a 2-year-old daughter and a 5-year-old son. Every time I started to hand my phone to my son, I'd get very, very nervous because I knew there could be some rabbit holes he would go down which I could not control,” Fisher said. “I had heard about what Ryan Reynolds did with Mint Mobile and how he put his name behind that, so I started to do some investigation, and I came across a company called Compax Venture, which has about 100 million subscribers on their platform worldwide. Compax is one of the biggest telecommunications companies in the world, and they've created 50 of what we call Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs), and these are mobile plans just like Mint Mobile, that sit underneath the big telecommunications companies like AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile. We're actually on the T-Mobile network through our partnership with Compax Venture. And so as I started to investigate these MVNOs, and because of my nervousness of handing my phone to my son, we met a man who is a very important donor in the Christian community and is a vice president of NVIDIA. He and Compax Venture invested more than $20 million into our program, and we went on a mission to beg one of the largest telecommunications companies in the country to block inappropriate content at the network level. They had all the power to be able to block it from day one, but they rely a lot on apps, and apps can have workarounds. So we convinced Compax Venture to convince T-Mobile to block inappropriate content, including pornography, anti-Semitism, hate speech, anything of that nature, and keep it away from the Christian community. We wanted to create a firewall so that type of content can't get through. That was the genesis of the whole process, the need to find and to and to try to figure out a way where my children didn't have to grow up in a world where 52 percent of young people between the ages of 11 and 13 years old experience pornography, and 62 percent of that 52 percent stumble across it unintentionally.”
Eventually, Fisher said, he and co-founder Chris Klimis said it was time to get going on the project.
“When Compax Venture finally convinced the big telecommunications company to allow our cyber security company, ALLOT, to block the inappropriate content at the network level, that's when the project got more serious,” Fisher said. “Unlike traditional filtering apps that can be bypassed or deleted, Radiant Mobile’s protection is embedded directly into the mobile network itself, providing unmatched safety, reliability, and peace of mind for parents and families. Once we got that approval and we could actually accomplish that and actually offer to the Christian community that promise of a firewall that could be created where inappropriate content and harmful content could be blocked at the seed level, that's when everything really took off. Once we knew we got that official confirmation we could do that, then Chris and I went full speed ahead to build the first ever Christian mobile plan.”
Klimis and Fisher said they are excited about the network’s launch.
“Safety has been a core value of mine for quite some time. I have six children myself, and for me, being someone who's spiritual, that type of content doesn't work in my house, and if you want to prevent that exposure, you have to have a solution that's practical,” Klimis said. “When Paul began to describe this idea that we would have a practical application for what I think is a spiritual problem, I was on board. There are so many technological advancements happening every single day, and parents are being left with no practical way to help navigate or have any kind of control in that space. We didn't want families just to have a sterile environment that didn't have anything conducive to educating or to reinforcing their values, so we wanted to also bring original content that is on another level than anything I've seen in 20 years. We wanted to be able to bring this to families, to have Biblical education, gamification and telling the greatest stories never told and bringing them to life. People can go to our Web site right now, radiantmobile.com, and begin to see it's all uniquely original content to see the type of time and commitment that we've brought to this space, to bring Jesus glory, but also to present these stories and this content in a creative way.”
“We've been working so hard on bringing this movement to the world, the first Christian mobile plan ever, so we started pre-sales on St. Patrick's Day for all of our Irish brothers and sisters. The real program will actually launch Easter Sunday, and with that, we'll also do 24 hours of Jesus,” Fisher added. “Currently, people can find us at radiantmobile.com, and that's where they can sign up for pre-sales. We have a really cool promotion going on right now where the first 10,000 people who switch from AT&T and Verizon over to us get a 20 percent discount, and they'll get all kinds of great VIP benefits and access to content. I would say we really have covered all the bases for the children, teens, and adults.”
Fisher and Klimis agreed families should seriously consider making the switch to Radiant Mobile.
“In terms of cyber security, we have all parental control features, and there is a lot of incredible, educational, inspirational, Christian content, and it doesn't cost them one penny. If you're paying $30 with T-Mobile today, you switch over to you're still with T-Mobile, and you switch over to Radiant Mobile, you pay the same exact amount of money, $30 per month, and you get our cyber security and parental controls,” Fisher said. “You also get the most powerful Christian content streamed to your phone every single day. So the question is, why not? If you're a true Christian and you want safety for your family, if that's something really, really important to you, and it doesn't cost you anything more than you're spending right now, why would you not switch? Why would you not come aboard and be with Radiant Mobile that offers you this safety and this protection at a very high level that no one in the country can possibly offer. Also, 60 days after we launch, we're coming out with a program called Phone to Home, and we've developed a device that will attach to the 5G in your router inside your home, and it's a whole 360 degree solution, meaning no pornography, no harmful content, no anti-Semitism, no hate speech, etc., and it will be on all the devices in your home.”
“I'm a practical person. When you have as many kids as I have, the solution to this type of issue has to be vertical. This is the first vertical solution I've seen, and it's not only with the filtering component, we're a streaming platform that will feature a lot of original content,” Klimis added. “The most practical application for me is I've got six kids, they're all playing sports, all around the Orlando area and all of the state of Florida. If I've got a way to rely on them to have a sharing component of a similar application on to know where they are, there are a lot of things that can go wrong. And in the next six to nine months, we're also going to be bringing anti-phishing senior secure, because we're not just wanting to bring safety for kids or for parents, we're wanting to bring this across all generations of an entire family. All these features are coming, and it's all baked into the same system, meaning I don't have to go across four or five different apps to figure out if it's all on and working. It's practical. It's in their hands. It's something that they can begin to take control of immediately. We believe the Internet was made for this day and time so the gospel would be preached across the Earth. We haven't seen a Jesus-centric offering anywhere in the world yet, and I want people to know this is something that's very, very important to us, and they're going to be able to trust the content we're going to expose them to.”
For more information, people can visit https://www.radiantmobile.com/
