Cox Communications officially announced the nationwide availability of Cox Mobile at CES this week. And it confirmed what Fierce Wireless had already reported: that Cox Mobile will ride on Verizon’s network.
Cox Mobile plans to launch a national advertising campaign later this month, in advance of the Super Bowl.
The Cox Mobile phone service is only available to Cox Internet customers in Cox markets. This is similar to the mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) services offered by fellow cable companies Comcast and Charter.
In fact, Cox has modeled its wireless offering very similar to Comcast and Charter. It’s offering simple data plans – Pay As You Gig and Gig Unlimited. And it’s supplementing its network with 4 million Cox Wi-Fi hotspots.
While the MVNOs of Cox, Charter and Comcast all ride on Verizon’s network, Altice USA’s mobile service uses T-Mobile’s network.
In July 2022, WOW! announced a new wireless service for its 1.9 million customers across the company's entire footprint. Its wireless service is powered by ReachNext, a mobile virtual network enabler. Reach Mobile also offers its own MVNO service. Reach Mobile and ReachNext are part of the same company.
In addition, the cable industry association NCTC is exploring how it can offer MVNO options to its smaller member cable companies.
In an August 2022 article, Wave7 Research analyst Jeff Moore provided a roundup of cable companies investigating wireless, including Optimum and Mediacom.
In a research note today the analysts at Cowen, led by Gregory Williams, wrote that the Cox Mobile launch “follows the convergence trend that we have seen in cable.”
Mobile has become an increasingly crowded space as cable launches competitive bundles, said Cowen. But the analysts noted that “Cox Mobile’s footprint will be relatively small” compared to Comcast and Charter.
There is also the new MVNO entrant Dish Wireless.
Meanwhile, mobile data traffic has grown exponentially since 2010, and Cowen expects it to continue as 5G deployments progress.
