The second quarter just ended on Monday. Yet today we see that MetroPCS has revealed some of their subscriber numbers. Perfect. That’s what we’re interested in, anyway. So, for starters, they had a healthy number of gross subscribers, at roughly 793,000. That would have brought them over the five million mark, except for that nasty little number we call churn. That was 4.5 percent, a 0.3 percent reduction from the second quarter of 2007, but a 0.5 percent increase from the first quarter. That, however, can be chalked up to seasonal patterns.

In an effort to deliver more premium content to its user base, Virgin Mobile has announced a partnership with PlayPhone. They are the “largest network of mobile content destinations in North America.” This includes media from Sony BMG, Cartoon Network, Konami, ABC Television, and more. So this will open up Virgin subscribers’ choices when it comes to mobile media.

It looks like the push into the Northeast by MetroPCS has begun. The carrier is now offering service in the greater Philadelphia area. This will be their third AWS market, following Las Vegas and Shreveport-Bossier City, Louisiana, and their 11th market over all.

So there are going to be some changes coming at Virgin Mobile. What follows is pure speculation, but hey, that’s the fun part about these acquisitions. It looks certain that Virgin will adopt a postpaid tier once the Helio acquisition passes through the necessary approval steps. The question for us prepaid kids is what this means for their current lineup of prepaid plans. I’m not quite sure they’ll hang onto all of those plans, and then have a series of postpaid plans on top of it. It kind of sounds like, gasp, Amp’d Mobile. So what will Virgin do to avoid that beaten path?

For those who are sick of hearing about the Virgin Mobile/Helio merger, we’ll start off the day with something else. For those who want more on the deal, it’ll come in a couple of hours. For now, we turn our attention to the mobile transaction market, which is rather slow in the U.S. now. Everyone I’ve talked to blames security concerns for the lack of mobile transaction growth. That should eventually be resolved, though, and analysts have put a number to the level it should hit by 2013: $300 billion.

We’ve been off the path of the Canadian auction lately, so let’s get with a little update. At the end of last week, the bidding hit $4.1 billion, with Rogers leading the way. The nation’s only GSM carrier has bid close to a billion itself, sitting at $946.1 million over 57 licenses. Analysts originally predicted that the auction would raise about $2 billion, and that plenty would be left on the table because of the restrictions giving 40 percent of the spectrum to new entrants. With the bidding about double original estimates, one has to wonder where those analysts are now.

In a move that had been rumored for nearly two months, Virgin Mobile USA finally made the announcement on Friday that they have bought Helio. The joint venture of SK Telecom and EarthLink will be sold to Virgin for $39 million in common stock. SK Telecom will also get two seats on Virgin’s board of directors. Of course, there still remains the issue of what will happen to the service. So let’s go over the salient points.

Eddie Hold is an analyst at Current Analysis. And apparently, he knows MVNOs, at least enough that RCR Wireless News interviewed him about it. Allie Winter has the piece, which is by all means a good read. Hold really nails it with some quotes, hitting on some serious flaws in the strategies employed by MVNOs. I’d like to go over a few of these points.

And we get our official announcement. The deal will be for about $39 million in equity, or 13 million shares of Virgin Mobile stock. There are a number of other financial details that go along with the deal, including an investment by SK Telecom of $25 million in Virgin Mobile. I’m sure we’ll cover this a lot more come Monday.

We learn very on in school that correlation is not causation. So when Fierce Wireless sees a Helio store shut down, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the company is ready to go kaput. But considering what we’ve heard all week, it’s a strong possibility. The MVNO is said to be phasing out its retail operations, with the long-rumored merger with Virgin Mobile still just a rumor. According to the report by Fierce Wireless, Helio customers could find themselves Virgin customers in due time, whether there’s a merger or not.