STAMFORD, Conn. — Charter is one of the large U.S. cable companies working its way into the mobile market. It already operates a network of public and private Wi-Fi hotspots, which serves more than 280 million wireless devices, according to RCR Wireless.
This year the company expanded into the smartphone business via the launch of its Spectrum Mobile MVNO, an operation that piggybacks on Verizon’s LTE network. Charter handles customer billing, service and handset activation.
Now Charter is testing LTE small cells in locations around the country, and the company says it will expand those tests into major markets New York City and Los Angeles in the next few months.
“The news is noteworthy considering Charter recently launched its Spectrum Mobile MVNO service and is hoping to use small cells as a way to offload traffic from Verizon’s LTE network and onto its own wireless network, thus saving money,” according to RCR Wireless.
Charter’s Chief Network Officer and SVP Craig Cowden also said that Charter has been testing fixed wireless services using 28 GHz and 3.5 GHz spectrum in locations around the country “for things like multiplayer AR/VR interactive gaming, multiple simultaneous 4K-quality video streaming, and ‘Desktop-as-a-Service’ models that push compute functions to the network cloud but require large bandwidth and low latency.”
