Another contender to enter the wireless service business is Cox Cable. The Atlanta-based company plans to build its own network in its cable service area, and partner with Sprint Nextel Corp. for roaming outside those areas.

Coxs spectrum licenses cover the areas around Atlanta, New Orleans, San Diego, Omaha, Neb., and Las Vegas as well as much of Kansas and southern New Mexico. Those areas have about 23 million people, said Stephen Bye, Coxs vice president of wireless.

Wireless phone service will add to Coxs video, phone and Internet services to head off competition from phone companies like AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc., which already have wireless service and are rolling out video.

Cox, which has 6 million customers, appears to be the only major cable company that is building its own cellular network right now, but its an area where the cable industry has long been involved.

Cox itself built and operated a cellular network covering Southern California and Las Vegas in the 1990s, then sold it to Sprint in 1999. Comcast Corp., the countrys largest cable company, also owned a wireless network in the 90s and had ties to Sprint.

The cable companies teamed up with Sprint again in 2005 to market wireless service to their video customers, but the project was scuttled this year.

Bye said the latest project with Sprint taught Cox that it was important to provide a consistent experience for customers, and that the best way to do that was to keep control under one roof rather than share it in a joint venture.

Forrester Research analyst Charles Golvin said Cox probably did the right thing to get out of wireless in the 90s to focus on upgrading its cable network with optical fiber that carries broadband and wired phone service.

In building a new wireless network now, Cox can take advantage of that fiber. Generally, wireless carriers are struggling with getting fast fiber-based data connections to their cellular towers. They need the fiber to handle higher wireless data speeds used by smart phones like the iPhone and wireless laptop cards.

Even though Cox can use its dense fiber network for its cell towers, the cost of building a wireless network will be at least hundreds of millions of dollars, Golvin said.

Cox will be selling phones under its own brand. Bye had no details on what handsets would be available, or what they would cost. Nor would he say which business model the company will use. National carriers like Sprint subsidize their phones and recoup the money through minute-based plans. Smaller, regional CDMA carriers Leap Wireless International Inc. and MetroPCS Communications Inc. dont subsidize their phones, and sell cheaper, unlimited-calling plans without contracts.

Cablevision Systems Corp., a New York-area cable company, is building its own wireless network, but its a less ambitious project than Coxs. Its using free airwaves and Wi-Fi technology to create a mesh of Internet “hot spots” over its cable service area.

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AP Business Writer Deborah Yao contributed to this report.

Source: cavic