Altice USA, the fourth largest cable company in the country, has announced that it’s launching its very own wireless carrier. It’s going to be a MVNO or Mobile Virtual Network Operator, meaning that it’s going to rely on an established carrier for infrastructure. Altice has chosen Sprint as its partner for this endeavor. Altice operates Suddenlink and Optimum. It was previously called Cablevision.
Sprint and Altice USA have inked a strategic MVNO agreement which enables the latter to launch its wireless carrier that relies on Sprint’s network.
This agreement was announced merely a day after T-Mobile and Sprint publicly confirmed that their merger talks are officially over. The two companies have decided to let this go as they couldn’t reach a mutually acceptable decision.
SoftBank, Sprint’s Japan-based majority owner, confirmed in a separate announcement that it intends to increase its stake in Sprint. It already owns 82 percent of Sprint and has said that it’s planning to keep ownership of outstanding common stock under 85 percent.
While Altice has confirmed that it’s going to launch a wireless carrier, it hasn’t confirmed when it’s going to do that. Some estimates suggest that it could take up to a year for the carrier to go live, that’s around the same time that Comcast’s Xfinity Mobile took to launch on Verizon.
Reuters adds that Sprint will be allowed to use Altice’s cable infrastructure to transmit cellular data and develop a next-generation network as part of this agreement.