Analysts are very bullish on Xfinity Mobile towards the end of this year. New Street Research stated that it expects Xfinity Mobile’s customer-base to be pretty sluggish through the first half of the year, but it will gain quite a bit of momentum come the second half of the year. Specifically, New Street Research stated that the fourth quarter should have double the amount of customers coming to Xfinity Mobile, compared to last year’s quarter. With the service adding around 450,000 customers by the end of the year, that would actually double the number of customers Comcast had on Xfinity Mobile at the end fo Q4 2017.
These analysts are also expecting Charter to post similar numbers when it launches its MVNO service later this year. Interestingly enough, New Street Research also posted a few other numbers in its report about Xfinity Mobile. This includes the fact that Xfinity Mobile customers use about 15% more data than other, similar customers. Comcast also pays Verizon around $5 per GB that its customers use, and that rate is tied to retail rates. Finally, the research firm believes that cable companies will acquire around 15% of postpaid customers by 2020. That means that cable companies would be picking up customers from other traditional carriers like T-Mobile and Sprint.
Xfinity Mobile is a mobile virtual network operator, or MVNO, that is powered by Verizon’s network and Comcast’s WiFi hotspots found around the country. Comcast was able to get an MVNO up and running using Verizon’s network, since it leased out some of its spectrum to Verizon quite a few years ago, and in the contract was the possibility to active an MVNO network on Verizon’s network. Comcast hadn’t opted to use that until last year. Charter has a similar clause in its contract with Verizon when it leased spectrum to the carrier as well. Xfinity Mobile runs off of WiFi and will automatically connect to Xfinity WiFi hotspots when in range. If there’s no WiFi available, it’ll then fall back to Verizon’s network. Allowing customers to use less data (in theory) than they would if they were on Verizon or another carrier. Comcast does also offer by the gigabyte pricing and unlimited pricing.