Here in Austin, Clear is marketing their wireless full tilt: all the media and even door to door (had two salesmen come by). The pitch is that the service is as good as cable broadband (for the "average household") and available everywhere (home, office, kid's school, on the commute).
No idea if that is true yet, but its easy to see how it could eventually be. Makes sense to band together against a common threat.
My guess is that you're 95% correct: they're likely warding off Verizon, who has become a major threat to all three companies. Offering FiOS TV, FiOS internet, phone, and wireless cell service is tough to compete with — even if you already offer three of the four.
So, these three companies are trying to prevent people from switching entirely to Verizon because they already have/are considering Verizon's wireless service. Or something to that effect.
(Note: I'm from the NY Metro area, so I've kept an eye on all these companies offerings the past few years.)
Makes sense to start in an area where some of the big players have territory that overlaps.
To be clear though - companies like Clear and Sprint aren't just selling 4g wireless devices, they are selling hotspots filling the roll of routers that supplant a home internet connection all together.
When Verizon gets in the game - maybe FIOS for heavy need households, 4g hotspot for a light duty setup?
I wonder if they're looking at injecting advertisement into the html stream? I know some cable companies replace your default search page when they find you've 404'd. It wouldn't be too hard to inject some pop-up scripts onto pages.
I was under the impression wireless bandwidth is always one generation behind cable bandwidth. Are they doing this because they are too lazy to upgrade their network and maintain their competitive edge over wireless? I can't imagine a state of the art cable internet connection could ever be seriously threatened by a wireless connection that offers what, 6Mbps under the best conditions? With the rise of internet video it seems like physical line internet providers are here to stay.
With HSDPA/HSUPA you can get 14.4 Mbps down and 5.76 Mbps up (under best conditions, of course). Yes, it is slower than state of art wired connection, but is the state of art wired connection available? Do you have 1.25 Gbps FTTH or 300 Mbps DSL available?
Wired providers became complacent, but wireless didn't. They caught up with wired and offer extra convenience, usable everywhere, not just at home. Wired providers should be afraid, very afraid and do something to change the situation, fast.
It's just a value-add thing. I work for one of the smaller MSOs that hasn't yet deployed wifi large scale but all the vendor material I get on focuses heavily on the value-add angle. I'm not super convinced it works but let's say you're considering a switch to telco video or satellite you might think twice about it because you use Cablevision wifi at the coffee shop. Telcos pioneered most of the bundled wireless deployments so there's some pressure for cable to offer it just to say they have it. It's cheap to deploy and maintain too so why not? For the bigger MSOs it's a tiny expense.
The paranoid part of me wonders if this isn't some deliberate net neutrality play. Maybe they'll start throttling bandwidth to sites that don't pay up, and they'll be able to point out that they have to do these things to keep the free wifi service going. And then after people are used to the idea...
Here in Austin, Clear is marketing their wireless full tilt: all the media and even door to door (had two salesmen come by). The pitch is that the service is as good as cable broadband (for the "average household") and available everywhere (home, office, kid's school, on the commute).
No idea if that is true yet, but its easy to see how it could eventually be. Makes sense to band together against a common threat.