Fangzheng Guo, from Shandong province in China, came to the United States two years ago to attend graduate school at Tufts University. At the top of his to-do list upon touching down in Boston: Get an American cellphone.
“Your parents, they want to know you got there safely,” Guo said.
The next day, he went to a T-Mobile store and purchased a prepaid monthly plan for $40. But he said he was dissatisfied with T-Mobile’s customer service and sometimes had problems making international calls.
So when his friend told him about CampusSIMs, another prepaid plan that caters to international students, he was on board.
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“It was more convenient,” said Guo, who felt at ease after reaching a customer-service representative who spoke Chinese.
Guo is a member of a growing and increasingly important population for businesses in Boston: international students.
Of the approximately 250,000 students at institutions of higher education in Greater Boston, 47,895 of them, or nearly 20 percent, are foreign nationals.
Foreign students in Greater Boston spent about $120 million here on non-college-related expenses like phone plans in 2014, according to the Greater Boston Convention & Visitors Bureau.
CampusSIMs is getting a chunk of that money. The growing startup has partnered with international student offices at 250 universities — including Harvard, Northeastern, and New York University — that distribute SIM cards to students who have purchased one of three plans offered by CampusSIMs.
The Boston-based mobile provider raised $2.5 million from investors this month in a funding round led by Nauta Capital, an international investing firm with offices in Boston.
CampusSIMs founder and chief executive Scott Pirrello, 27, is a Weston native who started the company in 2011. Pirrello said it has thousands of customers in all 50 states.
Pirrello’s company follows much the same model as Boost Mobile, TracFone, Virgin Mobile USA, and Cricket Wireless. Instead of owning and operating cell towers and satellites, CampusSIMs and companies like it buy minutes and data in bulk from the four big telecoms — Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint — and resell them. Its customers access the cellular network via SIM cards.
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These resellers are called Mobile Virtual Network Operators, or MVNOs. Mark Lowenstein, managing director of Mobile Ecosystem, a consulting firm in Brookline, said customers who choose MVNOs are often looking for something different than the American standard of signing a contract that locks you in for a few years.
And MVNOs often serve specialized markets, he said, such as ethnic groups or millennials. They want services such as unlimited international calling that “a big carrier, like an AT&T or Verizon, who have 100 million-plus subscribers, aren’t focused on.”
Pirrello said he concentrates on integrating features that matter to international students, such as plans that offer up to 500 minutes of international calling and the ability to freeze an account for the summer, when many international students return home.
CampusSIMs customers activate and manage their accounts through a smartphone app that works in English and Mandarin.
Pirrello said CampusSIMs’ cheapest plan is its most popular: $25 a month for unlimited text, 1,000 minutes of talk, and 500 MB (0.5 GB) of data.
The average American smartphone user burned through 1.6 GB of data each month in the first half of 2015, according to Strategy Analytics. But Pirrello said his customers spend most of their time on campuses and are never far from free Wi-Fi. And CampusSIMs signed a deal in April that will let customers connect to Wi-Fi hot spots of “two major cable providers.”
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Amanda Burke can be reached at amanda.burke@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @charlie_acb.