Peter Adderton likes to refer to the wireless brand he heads as the cell phone industry’s “Red Bull” amid a glut of mass-market milk products. Amp’d Mobile, the name of the company he founded, conveys the image of an “amped up,” powerful network, he says. The name is apt as Mr. Adderton and his slew of investors will be looking to capture the teenage wireless market when the company launches later this year.

It won’t be an easy task. Others including established wireless carriers and the eight other high-speed, branded wireless companies are all after the same market of early adopters and pop culture consumers whom they’re counting on to download Beavis and Butthead video clips and buy the latest Eminem singles on their cell phones.

But Mr. Adderton could pull it off. He’s already made a successful run through the mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) market, which enables non-wireless companies to create a branded service running on top of a big carrier’s network. He started Boost Mobile in 2000, which eventually gained 2 million U.S. subscribers through the prepaid model. Now he’s pushing Amp’d Mobile to be the first MVNO to run on a high-speed third-generation network, the kind that the carriers have spent millions building.

But while Amp’d Mobile formerly announced it will run over Verizon Wireless’ wireless broadband EV-DO (Evolution Data Only) network, Mr. Adderton is coy about mentioning his network partner’s name. The reason? He’s looking to brand Amp’d, not the company it’s piggybacking. For the new MVNOs like Amp’d, the carrier is less relevant, Mr. Adderton said, an attitude that could end up being a help or a hindrance.

For now, the stance fits the image of the hip underdog, whose job, as Mr. Adderton says, is to make the industry nervous. Mr. Adderton recently sat down with Red Herring to talk about the company’s upcoming launch and show off the company’s branded jet-black cell phone at the CTIA Wireless IT and Entertainment Show in San Francisco, one of the wireless industry’s biggest conclaves. Edited excerpts follow:

Q: When you created Boost, there wasn’t this kind of branded wireless content, so how did you get this idea?

A: We didn’t climb telephone poles for a living, and you won’t hear me talk about the Baby Bells of 25 years ago, how it was fragmented. I haven’t been around that long. We want Amp’d to be known as a new media company, and less of a wireless company. Because I think wireless and voice and text messaging is more of a commodity that everybody uses now, so how do we move the consumer forward so they’ll download music over the air or blog or instant message?

We’ve done what Yahoo has done. We’ve built a media center in Los Angeles to be able to have a studio and broadcast tracks. There will be live stuff coming to it.

MTV is not concerned that their competitor will come from a big media company. But they’re concerned about the two guys in the garage. That is what we like to consider ourselves in the wireless business. We are the two guys in the garage.

Q: With $300 million to spend?

A: We have a big garage.

Q: Compare the relationship with Boost and Nextel, to the differences with Amp’d and its carrier, as the MVNO market gets more advanced.

A: The carrier has less relevance to an MVNO going forward. I think that the relationship we had with Boost is that they were a major shareholder. The relationship we have with our carrier now is that they aren’t a major shareholder. The pipe doesn’t matter to me if it comes from Wi-Fi, WiMAX, or from a satellite solution. All we care is how do we get content to our device in the fastest, most cost-effective way for our consumer.

Our cell phone could be sitting on a Wi-Fi mode right now. We think that [flexibility] is more important than being bolted to a carrier [and] having to use their technology and their road map. When 4G, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, become good solutions, our company will merge and move with the times. We’ve got a whole team that is working on future interfaces.

For Boost, we had “powered by Nextel” on our box. And in my mind, it really took away from what we were trying to do. What we are trying to do now is create our own identity. We have individual shareholders through Universal Music Group, Highland Capital, Columbia, and Redpoint, and we want to build the brand and the company. We don’t want to be known as riding on a certain network.

Q. What is the carrier’s incentive to work with Amp’d, considering that approach?

A. I think the carrier can never go as deep in the youth market as we can. If Sprint is the milk in the supermarket, we are the Red Bull. We mix with vodka, they mix with cereal. They are really trying to make a commodity that goes out to everyone that drinks milk—there are not a lot of people who drink Red Bull. That is why I don’t think the carriers will ever be able to target the 17- or 18-year-olds.

But look at our handset and look at a Verizon handset. An 18-year-old doesn’t want to use the same handset as a 65-year-old. As you go forward in multimedia, it gets more important. They have everything from Murder She Wrote to The Simple Life with Paris Hilton. We don’t. Music is a classic example. They have Otis Redding, we have Eminem. The carrier realizes that they are going to need another brand to go after that market.

Q: How do you deal with not cannibalizing on the carrier’s service? Are there specific deals in place with them on this issue?

A: They are a competitor. We still buy minutes off our partners but you could ask any carrier: is it better to have us on your service even if you’re not making as much money, or have us somewhere completely different?

If you’re a carrier, I think it is better to cover your bets to make sure we are sitting on your network, making sure we are burning your minutes and not someone else’s. To compete as a carrier, you have to do MVNOs to target a demographic you can’t reach. Sprint will not do a deal with a brand that competes with them. There aren’t going to be brands lining up for an MVNO with Wal-Mart, because that would compete with their direct brand.

Q: There isn’t just competition with carriers, but with the new high-speed MVNO market. How will you compete with so many players coming in?

A: We have a track record of being able to create a successful new brand, but I don’t think it’s as crowded as everyone is talking about. We will be the only ones this year launching a 3G MVNO. People talk about P. Diddy. Even he was supposed to launch an MVNO. And I just sit back and say, it is an expensive exercise.

It is a $200 million or $300 million exercise to launch an MVNO. So I don’t think there are going to be nine of them lined up. The one who gets there first and sets the ground rules. We did it with prepay. Same thing with third generation. I know we are launching this year.

Q: What do you think of the Cingular iTunes phone?

A: I think it was a missed opportunity. Everyone was waiting for the iTunes Apple phone and they come out with some software that’s built into a handset that is two years old. It was a rush job. Good for us, I guess. I find it ironic that you announce a phone that looks like this [holds up a brick-sized PDA], and then bring out the nano [the latest Apple music player] next to it. It’s like Ford announcing the brand new GT and [saying] ‘By the way, here’s the ‘82 Taurus.’

Q: How much will the phone and the service cost?

A: The phone will be $99. But we are not announcing the service yet. We’ll announce that in November.

Q: Because you are targeting younger users and it’s a niche audience, will you have to charge substantially more than some other cheaper services to make a profit?

A: No, to the contrary. We understand that there is not $100 dollars a month that these consumers have to play with. We are going to take a bit of a gamble on our pricing and give them an unlimited subscription to data and hope they don’t burn through a whole heap of data a day because we could potentially lose money. We want to keep it simple.