D.C. Atty
Comcast executives are reportedly considering expanding the company’s telephone service into the mobile realm—or at least letting customers cut the cord to the cable modem. The Information reports that Comcast is looking at a plan that would offer mobile voice and data service over Wi-Fi hotspots, with leased cellular network capacity filling in the holes.
Comcast already offers a service, called Voice 2go, that allows existing Xfinity Voice customers to make calls from an Android or iOS device over existing Wi-Fi, using their existing home phone number. Voice2go works from any Wi-Fi connection. But the Voice2go app requires the caller to stay connected to the same Wi-Fi hotspot for the entire call, so it’s not exactly “mobile” in the sense that cellular networks are.
The new service would work in a fashion similar to that of Republic Wireless, which uses leased 3G and 4G cellular network capacity (in Republic’s case, from Sprint) as a fallback when Wi-Fi networks aren’t present. Comcast could also use its existing infrastructure to offer public Wi-Fi coverage in some areas, as it's begun to do in some states by adding a public Wi-Fi hotspot to existing home modems. As Comcast noted in a filing for its proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable, the company has "the largest Wi-Fi network in the nation."
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