NCTA: Comcast more interested in next-gen mobile

LAS VEGAS--Comcast is more interested in using the AWS spectrum it purchased to explore what’s coming next in mobility and wireless than in offering “just another cell phone,” Chairman and CEO Brian Roberts said Tuesday.

Speaking as part of a general session panel at The Cable Show here, Roberts said Comcast bought the spectrum in part because the price was right, but admitted he doesn’t know what exact applications the cable giant will pursue.

For now, he said, Comcast is exploring what it can offer through its MVNO relationship with Sprint to offer a quadruple play. But a recent trip to Asia clearly planted other ideas in Roberts’ mind.

“There is today’s world which is cell phones,” he said. “A bunch of us went to Japan, Hong Kong and Korea, and there it’s not about cell phones.”

Asian broadcasters have taken a piece of their spectrum and used to rebroadcast programming directly to cell phones, he said.

“It’s not a paid service – basically it’s digital TV with an old-fashioned antenna,” Roberts said. “It’s not coming over the cell phone airwaves. I don’t think broadcasters in this country are quite thinking that way.”

Comcast and its cable partners “bought 99% of the country with 20 megahertz” for about 60% of what Verizon and AT&T paid for the same spectrum, Roberts claimed, and Comcast will use that spectrum to explore what can be done with the next generation of wireless service, which may look very different from what wireless is today.

“We bought a growing asset, it’s an area we will focus on,” he said. “If it’s just about cell phones, I don’t think we need another cell phone.”

Adding wireless to his company’s service bundle would be appealing, Roberts admitted, for the same reason that bundling in general has appeal--the ability to deal with one service provider, one bill, one customer service operation.

Before the panel discussion, Roberts did new product demos both on videotape from 1996, where a younger Roberts first showed off what cable modems could do versus dial-up and ISDN, and then later in person, when he demonstrated what wideband cable modem service, the next generation of cable modems using channel bonding, could do versus today’s 3 Mb/s cable modem.

The latter demo, conducted with Bob Stanzione, CEO of Arris, which makes the channel bonding technology, at one point downloaded the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica--and a visual dictionary as well--in just over three minutes. That content represented the average content downloaded today by a family in an entire month, Roberts said.