Radiant Mobile, a new US cell network marketed to Christians, launches on May 5 with network-level blocking of pornography that adult account owners cannot turn off, alongside a default filter on LGBT and gender-related content. The plan costs $30 per month, runs on T-Mobile's network as a mobile virtual network operator, and is backed by $17.5 million from Compax Ventures, with Nvidia vice president Roger Bringmann as lead investor. Network security researchers say it is the first US consumer cell plan to enforce always-on, carrier-level content blocks of this kind.
Founder Paul Fisher told MIT Technology Review the goal is to build "an environment that is Jesus-centric, that is void of pornography, void of LGBT, void of trans." The blocking is powered by the Israeli cybersecurity company Allot, which sorts websites into more than a hundred categories. Pornography is blocked by default for everyone with no override; sexuality, which Allot uses as the bucket for LGBT content, is blocked by default but can be toggled off by adult account holders.
T-Mobile declined to say whether Radiant's content blocks violate its policies. A T-Mobile representative said the carrier has no direct relationship with Radiant Mobile and works through MVNO manager CompaxDigital. The structure mirrors other identity-driven MVNOs: Trump Mobile launched last year, and CREDOMobile routes a share of revenue to progressive causes.
Key facts
- 01Radiant Mobile launches May 5, 2026 as a T-Mobile MVNO charging $30 per month, with a portion routed to partner churches.
- 02The network uses Israeli cybersecurity firm Allot to block more than a hundred categories of website domains, including pornography, which adults cannot unblock.
- 03LGBT and gender-related content is filed under Allot's 'sexuality' category and blocked by default on every plan.
- 04Founder Paul Fisher raised $17.5 million from Compax Ventures, with Nvidia VP Roger Bringmann as lead investor.
- 05A cited survey claims 67% of pastors have a 'personal history' with porn use, which COO Chris Klimis said motivated his involvement.
Fisher's pitch to churches is that Radiant will donate a slice of each $30 monthly subscription back to the congregation. He says he has done outreach to thousands of US churches and recruited Christian influencers as marketers, with plans to expand into South Korea and Mexico. Chris Klimis, a minister in Orlando recruited as Radiant's chief operating officer, framed the product as a response to what he called a pornography crisis in the faith, citing a survey that found 67% of pastors have a "personal history" with porn use. Klimis, a father of six, said: "We've got to figure out some way to close the door to the digital space."
“Radiant has raised $17.5 million from Compax Ventures, with Nvidia VP Roger Bringmann as lead investor, to build a network that filters more than a hundred website categories.”— Jaeden Schafer
The blocking technology is blunt by design. If a user tries to load a domain in a banned category, the page simply fails. That is more aggressive than accountability apps like Covenant Eyes, which notify a friend or family member when a user views adult content but can be uninstalled. David Choffnes, a computer science professor and executive director of Northeastern University's Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute, noted that network-level blocking is the backbone of authoritarian internet censorship, though US carriers also use narrower versions of it to block malware domains.
The harder problem is classification. Anthony Re, a sales director at Allot, said the company does not maintain a dedicated category for gender content; LGBT material gets pulled into the "sexuality" bucket, which Radiant's own website describes as "sites that provide information on sex, sex and teenagers, and sexual education, without pornographic content." That gives Fisher wide discretion. He pointed to Yale University, whose main domain is currently classified as education and remains accessible, but whose lgbtq.yale.edu subdomain Radiant has placed under sexuality and blocked. "If we see [the LGBTQ content] on the front pages consistently of Yale University, we'll block them too," Fisher said.
Fisher's path into telecom is unusual. He spent 35 years in fashion as an agent for figures including Naomi Campbell and members of the Hilton and Getty families, and later hosted a reality show that recruited models from rehab facilities and homeless shelters. He says he now regrets that career: "Am I proud that I spent 35 years creating star models or star influencers? Not at all." The business idea, he says, came from a friend who pointed him to Ryan Reynolds's Mint Mobile, which T-Mobile acquired in 2023 for $1.3 billion, followed by what Fisher describes as a late-night revelation: "God is talking to me. Do something in the faith-based industry."
To replace the blocked sites, Radiant plans to bundle a library of religious content, including AI-generated Bible videos and devotionals built around children's characters such as Cinderella and Tinker Bell, licensed through Elf Labs. "Those characters were originally constructed with a conservative perspective," Klimis said. The Nvidia tie is notable: lead investor Bringmann recently funded a new complex at Austin Christian University in Texas, which describes itself as a school for Christian entrepreneurs.
Choffnes is skeptical the firewall will work as advertised. Maintaining a complete list of objectionable domains is, in his words, "really hard," and the broader question is whether the approach is sound at all. "I do believe in an open internet," he said. "I also believe that a lot of the internet is toxic, but I don't believe that this sledgehammer approach of blocking content is the right answer." Adults will also discover that pornography blocks cannot be lifted on their own accounts — a constraint normally associated with parental controls, not consumer plans sold to grown-ups.
Radiant is a small experiment riding on a much larger shift. AI-generated content, recommendation algorithms, and a coming wave of social media liability suits have made carrier- and platform-level filtering feel less fringe than it did five years ago, and Allot's category engine is the same kind of infrastructure that powers age-verification regimes abroad. The interesting question for the AI industry is not whether Radiant succeeds at $30 a month, but whether MVNOs become the next surface where companies decide, on a customer's behalf, which parts of the internet — and which AI-generated outputs — are allowed to load at all.
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