Charter, Verizon Discuss CBRS Opportunities at Conference

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Mobile World Congress Americas

Craig Cowden, SVP of wireless technology for cable company Charter Communications, revealed more details at yesterday’s Mobile World Live conference in San Francisco of the company’s planned move into mobile, including how changes in mobile architectures are enabling it to leverage its existing assets.

Speaking at the CBRS Alliance partner event today, Cowden said: “One of the reasons cable in general hasn’t reached into mobile is that it is generally a macro architecture, and there wasn’t really anywhere we could leverage our existing HFC plant in the macro. But as wireless infrastructure goes from 4G to 5G, it’s going from macro to small cells, and we definitely think our HFC plant is a competitive advantage”.

“Charter already is a wireless company. 80 percent of the traffic is served in the home or in the office, and we are a significant WiFi provider that already serves a significant amount of traffic over wireless infrastructure – but we do not monetize that. We are not a mobility provider, so that’s what we intend to do,” he said.  

Charter is looking to mix wide area coverage as a Verizon MVNO with its own WiFi infrastructure for offload, with licensed and unlicensed small cells added to the mix “to further offload and for other use cases”.

The cable company is set to trial CBRS-enabled technology in Florida and North Carolina imminently, working with a number of vendor partners. The work includes trials for mobility and investigations into how it can be used with existing cable infrastructure.

September 15, 2017

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