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Carrier Services
Sprint Accelerates MVNO Efforts
Carrier Adds Cablevision to Partners List
by Jim Barthold
Sprint has added another cable customer to its list of “affinity partners,” companies who are willing to swallow their pride and identity in order to be able to quickly market wireless services.
New York-based Cablevision Systems said yesterday that it would sell Sprint PCS-branded wireless service on its Optimum Store Online shopping destination and provide customers who sign up for Sprint with a $70 “Optimum Cash” rebate for each new line.
Cable is hungry to enter the wireless space with a wireless play that complements its voice, video and broadband data services. Although Sprint has been mentioned as a possible source of wholesale minutes to let cable operators become MVNOs, that’s not the case with Cablevision or a trial Sprint is doing with Time Warner Cable in Kansas City right now. In both those instances – and probably every other one that might arise – the wireless service is branded Sprint PCS, said John Overy, director of Sprint’s Cable Solutions business development team.
“If it was an MVNO we would be giving them minutes use on our network and they would have to go out and acquire handsets, develop their own marketing plan, come up with their own provisioning system,” said Overy. “There’s a lot of work that actually goes into marketing an MVNO. For both Time Warner and Cablevision, they’ve been able to avoid that and quickly get up and running offering wireless services to their customers.”
Cable operators are usually greedy about controlling every piece of their offerings -- including any brands that travel to their subscribers. Sprint comes into the relationship with an upper hand; it owns the wireless spectrum and can decide how it will dole out minutes and to whom. If it doesn’t want cable running its own wireless service under its own brand, it won’t make those minutes available wholesale.
“Probably the best way to think about this is as an affinity partnership in which Cablevision is going to be featuring and promoting Sprint’s wireless services in conjunction with Cablevision’s Optimum Store Online,” Overy said.
Cable, he emphasized, is not Sprint’s enemy. And Sprint, conversely, is not cable’s enemy.
“We both have another natural enemy: the local telephony company,” Overy said.
The Sprint-cable partnership is “really going after the same market and (an MVNO) involves duplicating so many systems and other efforts that it just seems much more natural for wireless to partner together to offer cable wireless services together,” he concluded.
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