Comcast has scheduled an event Thursday morning to disclose more information on the company's looming wireless service. A Comcast announcement states that the company will host "an analyst event to discuss the details of its previously announced mobile initiative, which utilizes an existing MVNO agreement." The 9AM Thursday event should finally begin shedding some light on something the cable giant has been teasing for the better part of two years.
The service, slated for a mid-2017 launch, will operate predominantly on WiFi -- while leaning on the Verizon Wireless network when necessary. The company has yet to offer any hard pricing details on the service, but while speaking at an industry conference last month, Roberts said the company hopes the wireless offering will help nudge users toward bundling additional services.
"The product itself is going to save you money by taking our bundle.," Roberts said. "We’re going to sell more products, not including wireless, but broadband, as a result of this offering."
How you'll "save money" if the focus is getting you to buy more services from Comcast isn't clear. But Roberts bubbled over at the rise in connected devices, all driving your monthly bandwidth consumption ever higher.
“We’re getting ready for a day when you have a smart music system, a smart refrigerator, smart devices and they all just work in their home,” Roberts said. “Hopefully the bits per home continue to rise and the company with the best network, defined as wired and wireless, will have a real advantage.”
Roberts is particularly excited, because he knows as home usage grows, those homes will inevitably run into the company's arbitrary and utterly unnecessary usage caps and overage fees. Roberts also knows Comcast's voice service will lean heavily on Comcast's existing footprint of roughly 15 million hotspots. Many of those hotspots exist in consumers homes, where over the last few years firmware updates have turned residential gateways into public WiFi access points.
That said, it's hard for most of the industry to get excited about another MVNO. Given Comcast's history of poor customer service, consumers are similarly skeptical. T-Mobile CEO John Legere predicted earlier this year that Comcast's MVNO, like countless MVNO's before it, would struggle to gain traction resulting in Comcast taking a deeper dive into directly offering real cellular wireless connectivity.
"The future looks a little rough for these two megacorps as their legacy businesses erode," Legere said of Comcast and Verizon. The freshly merged company would create "the ultimate evil corporation of all time," joked Legere.
Granted if long-standing rumors that buying T-Mobile is Comcast's plan B, T-Mobile customers may not be laughing over the long term.