Coming off another “great” quarter for its wireless business, Comcast is preparing to launch an employee field test with 5G in June.
Revenue in Comcast’s wireless segment grew by 32% during the quarter. Overall, it added 1.2 million lines over the past 12 months, including 318,000 lines in the first quarter of 2022, which for the fifth consecutive quarter was the best since launching the business in 2017.
For wireless, “it was a great quarter,” said Comcast Cable President and CEO Dave Watson. “We absolutely believe our strategy and focus on accelerating growth in wireless is indeed working.”
During prepared comments on Thursday’s earnings call, Comcast Chairman and CEO Brian Roberts said tests of deploying spectrum to potentially offload wireless traffic is “progressing nicely.” During the quarter, “we turned up our first 5G radios and will be launching an employee field test in June,” he said.
Watson elaborated, saying they’re “fully integrating mobile – one of the most important things – into everything we do at Cable. We’re leaning in on marketing, we’re playing offense with mobile in terms of how we talk about it … Every single sales channel has been activated at this point.”
Comcast has an expanded MVNO agreement with Verizon, which Watson said “is working.” And for the majority of Comcast’s footprint, it’s taking a “capital light” approach to wireless, which he said is the right approach.
However, it continues to be “opportunistic,” with technical trials. He didn’t specify spectrum bands, but Comcast has been active in U.S. spectrum, like the Citizens Broadband Radio Services (CBRS) that it acquired in 2020.
“We’re prepared,” Watson said. “We’re doing technical trials and leveraging our spectrum in the offload traffic in high dense areas where that makes financial sense. So we’re running trials, optimizing the approach and turned up our first – as Brian said – first 5G radios at the beginning of February, employee trials are underway. So we’ll be ready when and if this makes sense.”
Fierce Senior Editor Diana Goovaerts contributed to this report.