Reuters has filed a report citing Comcast’s president confirming that the cable company will resell Verizon Wireless service following the sale of the SpectrumCo AWS spectrum the company partly owned along with Time Warner, Cox and BrightHouse last Friday. As a condition of the deal, four yet to be named Comcast markets will begin Verizon Wireless sales and bundling next year, while other former SpectrumCo holders will also resell services at a later date as a condition of the transaction.
SpectrumCo was the holding company formed by the aforementioned companies to participate in the FCC AWS spectrum auction held in 2007 with the goal of using it to build out a nationwide mobile broadband and cellular network, with the intention of competing with current carriers. The venture held onto the spectrum until Cox Communications recently announced that it would discontinue offering its own wireless services via Sprint as an MVNO and effectively abandon its planned network rollout, citing an inability to compete and offer competitive devices.
Verizon Wireless purchased the 700MHz spectrum from the venture for $3.6 billion and plans to use it to shore up its LTE network, while Comcast and Time Warner have also confirmed that they would wind down their current resale agreements with Sprint and Clearwire ahead of the Verizon resale  launch. Despite that, both companies do plan to hold on to their stakes in Clearwire for the foreseeable future.
