Blazing Fast Wireless

Kansas City Business Journal: Time Warner Cable plans to launch a 4G mobile broadband service in the Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, area December 1.

The service, which offers much faster broadband connections for wireless devices, will be available to all the areas served by Time Warner Cable in North Carolina’s Triangle area—including Raleigh, Durham, Cary, and Chapel Hill, Time Warner Cable said in a release last week. Customers will be able to buy Road Runner on the Go as part of a bundle with at least one other Time Warner Cable service. Prices for the different bundles will range from $39 to $79 a month.

Time Warner Cable also will introduce the service December 1 in the Greensboro and Charlotte areas.

The cable-television giant, which has branched into phone and Internet service in recent years, will join Sprint Nextel Corp. in trying to win 4G customers in the Raleigh-Durham area. Sprint will start selling 4G service in the Raleigh market at about the same time Time Warner Cable does, Sprint spokesman John Taylor said.

Both companies are reselling 4G service being rolled out by Clearwire Corp., based in by Kirkland, Washington, in which both are investors and Sprint is 51 percent owner. The companies and others invested last year to help Clearwire launch an ultrafast, high-capacity mobile broadband service using WiMAX technology. Investors can bundle and sell the service under their brands.

Clearwire also will begin selling its 4G product, branded Clear, in the Triangle market around December 1 as a standalone product, not bundled like Time Warner Cable’s product.

Other big wireless carriers plan to use competing 4G technology LTE, though Verizon Wireless and AT&T Inc. have yet to commercially launch a 4G service.

Melissa Buscher, a spokeswoman for Time Warner Cable in Morrisville, North Carolina, said that Time Warner Cable is responding to customer demand for the same speed on wireless Internet connections as is available through direct cable connections to homes and businesses. At a top speed of 6 megabits a second, Time Warner Cable’s 4G technology can transmit bandwidth-heavy content such as streaming video nearly as fast as the company’s standard Road Runner service, which provides such content through a cable modem at a top speed of 7 megabits a second.

The 4G connection offers wireless data transmission at speeds five times faster than the 3G connections currently provided by Time Warner Cable.

“This is an important part of our strategy to give our customers any content on any device, anytime, anywhere,” Carol Hevey, executive vice president of Time Warner Cable’s Carolina region, said in the release.

Sprint, for its part, claims a top speed of more than 10 megabits a second for its 4G network.

“Time Warner will focus on selling Road Runner Mobile (to) allow its existing residential customers to take their broadband connection anywhere they go in their service territory,” said Berge Ayvazian, chief strategy officer for Yankee Group Research Inc. “Sprint will focus on selling its 4G service to both current and new mobile customers, many of which will be business users with notebook computers.”

Time Warner Cable said it plans to add new mobile services at some point, such as the ability to program a digital video recorder from a mobile device and for customers to take their video content with them on the go. The company will expand its 4G network to new areas during the next few months, including Dallas, Texas, and Honolulu and Maui, Hawaii.