The Wi-Fi Brotherhood
Last week’s Circana Week-in-Review in Mobile coverage was taken over by the new Google Pixel and Ver zon’s (pun intended!) new rate plans, thus we did not discuss the comments of Gary Koerper, Charter SVP of Emerging Technology, regarding their partnership with Comcast on the public Wi-Fi access front. We have been writing for years about Charter Mobile and Xfinity Mobile’s impressive MVNO business model to go after a lucrative and good-credit household base with a strong broadband-cellular bundle that runs on a highly reliable network (by Verizon) with Wi-Fi offload capabilities for cost purposes as users’ cellphones would automatically connect to the cable operator’s Wi-Fi network when available (at home or one of the thousands of public Wi-Fi networks powered by other customers). According to FierceWireless, which interviewed Mr. Koerper following his speech at the ConnectX cable tradeshow, Mr. Koerper commented that Charter and its closest colleague, Comcast, have extended their partnership to include access to each operator’s public Wi-Fi networks powered by their commercial and residential users’ cable routers. This means that an Xfinity Mobile customer’s data traffic is now automatically routed to a public Wi-Fi network of Spectrum (Charter), if there is no available Xfinity (Comcast) public Wi-Fi offering nearby (and vice versa).
The Circana Take:
- The cable MVNO Wi-Fi offloading is an integral part of the successful business model as 85% of the traffic (on Spectrum Mobile devices according to Mr. Koerper) runs through Wi-Fi networks, and the extension of the public Wi-Fi network should help both Comcast and Charter boost this figure upwards.
- It is important to note that despite their immense success in attracting AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon’s mobile customers (the Xfinity Mobile/Spectrum Mobile duo serve over 11 million mobile lines), the operation has to yet to be profitable for either company. Higher Wi-Fi off-load rates directly impact each operation’s bottom lines in a positive way.