USA Today’s Leslie Cauley has this piece of news: Comcast and Time Warner will launch wireless voice service in conjunction with Sprint later this month. Comcast will launch service in Boston and Portland and Time Warner will kick it off in Austin and Raleigh, NC. (The two companies tested the wireless voice option in these markets over the summer.)
The launches are the first fruit of a consortium formed in November 2005 by Comcast, Cox, Time Warner and Advanced/Newhouse with Sprint-Nextel as the mobile carrier partner.
Cauley doesn’t offer a lot of details but it sounds like customers will have to buy the operators’ residential VoIP service to get the wireless option, as well as at least one other cable service.
Ease-of-use will be the hallmark of the new service, Garcia [John Garcia, President of the consortium/joint venture] says. “People want simplicity.” One example: A “universal” voice mail box feature alerts customers on the cell when a message has been left on their home phone (you have to subscribe to the cable operator’s home phone service).
New software will also make it easier to send and receive e-mail, he says.
Hoping to drive bundle sales, Garcia says cable companies will require customers to buy at least one other service, such as broadband or video, before they can sign up for wireless.
Some of the advanced features announced at the time of the venture’s formation — such as remote PVR programming — aren’t part of the service yet.
But, even without the bells and whistles promised when the venture launched, this is a big deal. In at least four markets, cable operators will be offering for the first time a “quadruple-play” service consisting of video, landline voice, mobile voice and high-speed data services. And with the $2.4 billion in broadband wireless spectrum the top cable companies bought this past summer, you can bet on widespread mobile voice service launches across the industry in 2007, not to mention tests of new services that extend beyond remote PVR programming.
Cynthia Brumfield at 9:21 AM|Comments(0)
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