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April 1, 2005

Cable Operators Have Terrible Wi-Fi Plans

By Glenn Fleishman

This trade-magazine article tries to show how cable operators are tied into Wi-Fi, but demonstrates their wrong-headed approach: The article surveys efforts by Comcast, Charter, and Time-Warner to offer their cable television subscribers some kind of Wi-Fi adjunct. But it’s a lot of spotty, weird plans that don’t bring enough locations or value.

Comcast partners with T-Mobile to discount the T-Mobile service, but as a Comcast subscriber, I can tell you I received a couple of coupons and virtually no information since about the partnership, which is more of a slightly discount off retail. If they wanted to do it right, they could pursue an SBC DSL/Wi-Fi promotion and offer a $20/month unlimited service plan—the same rate that T-Mobile only makes available to its cell subscribers. However, that might undercut T-Mobile cell market, and Comcast and T-Mobile aren’t connected except through a partnership.

Time-Warner is installing Wi-Fi in a small number of random venues—the article makes it sound like quite a few, but the scale of “quite a few” is thousands now, not hundreds. The writer says that Time-Warner installs the service and sells minutes wholesale to the venue which then resells them at retail. Time-Warner Roadrunner cable subscribers get a small amount of free service in some locations.

Finally, Charter is reselling RemotePipes Wi-Fi footprint. They’re an aggregator, but it’s extremely difficult to understand their footprint from their Web site.

Bottom line: if this is the best they can do in response to SBC’s DSL and Wi-Fi bundle, then we can expect the DSL churn rate in SBC territory to remain quite low.

Posted by Glennf at April 1, 2005 1:01 PM

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