Join the Crowd: Cable Company Cox to ramp up their offerings to include wireless service

October 27, 2008 · Filed Under Recent News, Technology

Cable company Cox Communications will add cell phone service to its service bundle starting in 2009. But will anyone pay attention or care in the crowded field of wireless providers? Maybe.

The cable operator announced Monday that it will partner with Sprint Nextel to resell its wireless service to customers in its cable territory. Cox already bundles high speed Internet, phone, and TV service, similar to other cable companies like Comcast do. And soon it will add wireless service for a quadruple play offering that could be interesting depending on the price point.

“Wireless service will be a key driver to Cox’s future growth,” Cox President Pat Esser has stated.

But Cox isn’t stopping with just reselling Sprint’s wireless service, which in itself isn’t big news. It also plans to build its very own 3G wireless network, and plans to eventually build a 4G network using LTE technology. The company will use the nearly $550 million worth of bandwidth it bought in the Federal Communication Commission’s AWS and the 700 MHz wireless auctions.

As consumers become more mobile, wireless service is quickly becoming an important consideration for cable operators. But getting into the wireless game won’t be easy for Cox, which faces an already saturated and competitive wireless market and an expensive network build-out, and it’ll take a few years to know if they can break from the pack.

This isn’t Cox’s first time in this rodeo. In 2005, Cox Communications, Comcast, Time Warner, and Advance/Newhouse Communications, joined up with Sprint to form Pivot, and that was supposed to develop wireless services that the cable operators could bundle and resell to their customers. Nearly three years later, and the Pivot brand is dead, more or less.

This time around, Cox plans to use its existing voice switching technology and fiber within its network footprint to build the wireless network. The company will be building the service from the ground up as opposed to just bolting on a service from the outside. A nice philosophy, but the plan sounds expensive and risky, and it’s less clear whether Cox’s latest strategy will work considering that more than 85 percent of Americans already subscribe to cellular phone service of some kind.

Cox will have to offer a great deal to get people to switch or start up new service. We’ll see.

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