Comcast said it plans to sell its Xfinity prepaid broadband internet and TV service through Boost Mobile retail locations
As part of broader plans to launch a prepaid broadband internet and cable television service, Comcast said it plans to tap a retail partnership with Sprint’s Boost Mobile prepaid brand.
The deal calls for Comcast to offer its Xfinity Prepaid Service at select Boost Mobile retail locations later this year, with plans to expand to all 4,400 Boost Mobile locations within Comcast’s service areas by the end of 2017. The Xfinity service is set to begin rolling out later this year starting in Illinois, Michigan, Georgia, Florida and Indiana.
Xfinity customers will be able to sign up for the prepaid service or make monthly payments at the Boost Mobile locations. Sprint has been angling to increase its retail exposure in an attempt to reignite interest in its postpaid and prepaid services. Sprint’s prepaid businesses lost a collective 264,000 net connections during the first three months of the year, which was hit by outsized customer churn of 5.65% for the quarter.
Sprint recently altered leadership of its prepaid brands, naming former Ntelos CEO Jim Hyde as president of prepaid and wholesale services at Sprint, where he will oversee development and strategy across the Boost Mobile, Sprint Prepaid and legacy Virgin Mobile USA business, as well as manage wholesale relationships with mobile virtual network operator partners.
The agreement with Boost looks to renew a long-lost relationship between Sprint and Comcast, which dates back to the formation of Sprint PCS in the mid-1990s. After ditching its ownership stake in Sprint PCS, Comcast partnered with Sprint and other cable partners to bid on 1.7/2.1 GHz spectrum licenses in 2006, with Sprint pulling out of the joint venture shortly after the conclusion of the auction. Those cable companies subsequently pulled out of the Pivot joint venture with Sprint that allowed them to offer mobile services through an MVNO model.
Shortly after, Sprint and Comcast partnered up with other investors to pile $3.2 billion into the combined WiMAX offerings of Sprint and Clearwire in 2008, although Comcast eventually wrote off that investment.
Comcast has been rumored to be re-entering the mobile telecom space, with its current participation limited to reselling Verizon Wireless service as part of a bundled offering. The cable giant has an agreement in place to enter the mobile telecom market through an MVNO agreement with Verizon Wireless connected with the sale of 1.7/2.1 GHz spectrum licenses to Verizon Wireless, which Comcast initially acquired in the partnership with Sprint.
Comcast is currently eligible to bid in the Federal Communications Commission’s planned 600 MHz incentive auction process, and has recently created a mobile division within its business.
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