Altice USA today launched its nationwide mobile phone service, offering “lifetime unlimited talk, text, and data” for $20 a month for existing Optimum and Suddenlink customers, $30 a month for non-customers.

Altice has agreements with Sprint and AT&T to host its wireless service on both provider’s 4G LTE networks when customers are outside the range of a suitable Wi-Fi network. Altice’s plan is designed with pricing simplicity — $20 per line, up to five lines per account. A $10 activation fee may apply and prices do not include taxes, fees, and surcharges. The plan provides:

• unlimited data, text, and talk nationwide (up to 50 GB data usage per month, after which speed is subject to throttling to 128 kbps for the rest of the billing cycle),
• unlimited mobile hotspot (speed limited to 600 kbps),
• unlimited video streaming (streaming video will play “at DVD 480p quality”),
• unlimited international text and talk from the U.S. to more than 35 countries, including Canada, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Israel, most of Europe, and more, and,
• unlimited data, text and talk while traveling abroad in those same countries.

Altice discloses customers connected to 4G LTE service should expect download speeds of 6-8 Mbps and upload speeds of 2-3 Mbps with “round-trip latency of less than 100 ms.” If you connect to a 4G LTE Advanced cell tower, customers can expect faster download speed of 12-30 Mbps. Altice does not allow customers to connect to 3G service and does not support 5G service at this time.

Altice claims its mobile plan can save customers up to $600 per year for one line, and up to $1,100 per year for households and families with five lines. It is also the first cable mobile plan that will accept non-customers, at a higher price. Non-Optimum or Suddenlink customers (or current customers who discontinue cable service or who fall seriously past due on their accounts) will pay $30 a line, a $10 premium.

Altice claims its mobile network welcomes customers bringing their own devices, and offers an online compatibility checker. But an FAQ claims Altice Mobile is currently only able to support iPhone for Bring Your Own Phone service. It must be iPhone SE, 6 or newer, and operate iOS 12.2 or above.

In contrast, Comcast and Charter both accept a wider range of devices and rely on Verizon Wireless’ 4G LTE network, but at a price of $12-14/GB or $45/month for unlimited talk, text, and data. Those two cable companies only sell mobile service to customers subscribed to their home broadband services.

Altice USA could be your next cell phone provider, if you subscribe to Cablevision’s broadband service in the metro New York City area.

The Wall Street Journal reports Altice is preparing to launch an unlimited calling/texting/data plan that will cost between $20-30 per month, powered by Cablevision’s in-home Wi-Fi, its network of public Wi-Fi hotspots, and Sprint’s 4G LTE network.

The service, likely to be called Altice Mobile, is the latest entry from cable operators pitching low cost mobile service as an incentive to keep customers from switching providers. Altice will charge dramatically less for its unlimited plan than Xfinity Mobile and Spectrum Mobile ($45) — both reselling Verizon Wireless service — (with speeds reduced to 1 Mbps download and 512 kbps upload after 20 GB of data usage in a month.)

Customers using AT&T and Verizon pay even more. Unlimited monthly plans for a single phone start at $80 at Verizon and $70 at AT&T, depending on bundling certain other AT&T-owned services. For less than half the price, Altice Mobile would deliver all the same services larger providers offer, although Altice intends to offload as much usage as possible to its network of Wi-Fi hotspots, to keep costs low. Before Altice acquired the cable company, Cablevision built a major Wi-Fi presence in the New York City metro areas where it provides cable service. Altice announced it intends to strengthen that network to support its mobile initiative, including the possibility of deploying its own small cell network.

Where Altice cannot supply its own wireless connection, it will rely on Sprint to take over, paying the cell phone company for its customers’ traffic. In return, Sprint will be able to bolster its network in Altice’s service area, perhaps even using Altice’s fiber-to-the-home network, now under construction. That could help Sprint launch 5G service relatively soon in the region, regardless of whether its pending merger with T-Mobile USA is approved. To protect the venture, Altice has secured an agreement with both T-Mobile and Sprint not to terminate its contractual agreement with Sprint should a merger be approved. But the service will still be dependent on network owners like Sprint willing to sell connectivity. Should Altice Mobile take a significant share of the market, network owners may be reluctant to renew such contracts, or price them much higher at renewal time, raising prices.

The cable industry’s incentive for getting into the wireless business, even if it proves unprofitable, is plain to see. All entrants require their mobile customers to maintain a broadband account in good standing to qualify for mobile service. Comcast, Charter, and Altice are aware their video packages are increasingly untenable in a cord-cutter’s marketplace, but maintaining internet service remains essential. In most areas where the cable operators provide service, Verizon or AT&T also sells both broadband and wireless service. Customers may be reluctant to bounce between providers looking for a better deal if they also have to switch mobile providers at the same time.

Times up. Legacy devices like the GizmoPal watch will stop connecting to Verizon after the company shuts down its CDMA/3G network at the end of the year.

Customers with older phones and devices that are dependent on Verizon Wireless, take note: those devices may stop working at the end of this year as Verizon Wireless mothballs its legacy CDMA network and 3G mobile data. Verizon originally announced it was planning to shut down CDMA and 3G service last summer, and stopped activating new devices that did not support the current 4G LTE standard. Since that time, the company has been gradually replacing CDMA and 3G-dedicated frequencies to 4G LTE to relieve congestion.

As this transition continues, some customers with older basic phone are noticing call issues and a lack of adequate mobile data service. That happens when a tower has re-dedicated almost all of its available spectrum to 4G LTE service, and those using older devices share a quickly declining number of frequencies. Some smartphone owners are also affected, even if their device supports 4G LTE data, because it may still rely on Verizon’s CDMA network to make and receive phone calls.

One of the biggest impacts of the shutdown will be felt by General Motors’ OnStar customers driving vehicles made before 2015, which rely on Verizon CDMA and 3G technology to support GPS, crash detection, diagnostics, and voice calling. Starting with 2015 models, GM moved its OnStar platform in new vehicles to AT&T’s 4G LTE network. Some GM vehicle owners, but not all, have the option of upgrading to OnStar over AT&T’s 4G LTE network with a retrofit kit, which also supports an in-vehicle hotspot. If this option is not available, service is expected to sunset for older vehicles on Dec. 31, 2019.

Some medical monitoring devices that rely on Verizon’s legacy CDMA network will also cease working unless a retrofit or upgrade is made available by the manufacturer.

Affected devices include:

• CDMA (3G)-only devices, including 3G basic phones and 3G smartphones
• 4G LTE smartphones that do not support HD Voice
• Apple iPhone 5s or prior including the Apple iPhone 5c
• Connected devices with CDMA (e.g,, GizmoPal, GizmoPal2, GizmoGadget and some Hum + models).
• In-car telematics devices like GM’s OnStar on pre-2015 model year vehicles
• Certain medical monitoring devices

Verizon had originally planned to mothball its CDMA network in late 2021, but the carrier needed to repurpose existing spectrum to meet growing data demands on its network, so it moved the drop dead date forward to Dec. 31, 2019.

AT&T customers with Samsung Galaxy 8 Active or LG’s V30 or V40 smartphones began noticing a new icon on their phones starting last weekend: an italicized 5GE, leading some to believe 5G wireless service has now reached AT&T’s network.

Not so fast, AT&T.

AT&T’s use of 5GE, which stands for “5G Evolution” in AT&T’s techie parlance, is another example of how wireless carriers exploit up and coming technology upgrades that are unprotected from overzealous marketing misuse. The actual 5G standard is different from 5GE, and customers using 5G on millimeter wave frequencies can expect very different performance in comparison to today’s 4G LTE experience. But with 5G being hyped in the media, AT&T is attempting to capture some of that excitement for itself.

The company’s marketing division managed to accomplish a speed and technology upgrade without spending millions of dollars on actual 5G network upgrades — just by changing an icon on customers’ phones and making them believe they are getting a 5G experience. In fact, 5GE is actually just the latest evolution of 4G LTE already known to Verizon customers as LTE-Advanced or LTE Plus on Sprint’s network — technology including carrier aggregation, 256 QAM, and 4×4 MIMO that has been in use on competing cellular networks in the U.S. since at least 2016. But just as Verizon customers saw significant speed improvements from Verizon’s updates to the 4G LTE standard, as AT&T deploys similar upgrades in each of its markets, customers should notice similar performance improvements.

AT&T claims 5GE is already live in 400+ markets with more to come. In the short term, the “upgrade” that was pushed to AT&T network devices last weekend only switched on the 5GE icon, which will mean little to AT&T customers already reached by 5GE and never knew it until this past weekend, and nothing to those still waiting for the upgrade to arrive.

Walter Piecyk, an analyst at BTIG Research, says AT&T’s latest spectrum deployments will matter more than whatever the company brands its latest upgrade, and could eventually allow AT&T to surpass Verizon Wireless in network performance.

AT&T’s recent effort to improve its network by deploying more wireless spectrum — up to 60 MHz in many areas, is not the 5G upgrade customers might expect, but it will deliver faster speeds and more performance on today’s smartphones.

AT&T calls its forthcoming actual 5G network 5G+, and the company is launching a modest but authentic 5G experience in limited “innovation zones” in Jacksonville, Fla., Atlanta, Ga., Indianapolis, Ind., Louisville, Ky., New Orleans, La., Charlotte and Raleigh, N.C., Oklahoma City, Okla., as well as Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Waco, Tex.

In a money-saving maneuver, AT&T’s combined spectrum upgrades include 20 MHz of FirstNet first responder spectrum (prime 700 MHz spectrum shared with AT&T customers except during emergencies) it received in 2017, 20 MHz of AWS-3 spectrum (1755-1780 MHz for uplink operations and 2155-2180 MHz for downlink) it acquired for $18 billion in 2015, and 20 MHz of WCS spectrum (2300 MHz) it acquired from NextWave for $650 million back in 2012. All of this spectrum is expected to be activated at the same time as technicians work to upgrade each AT&T cell tower. This dramatically cuts AT&T’s costs and truck rolls for incremental upgrades.

AT&T calls its improved 4G LTE network “5G Evolution”

“We’re turning up not only the FirstNet spectrum that we got, but all of this other spectrum that we’ve acquired over the last few years,” AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson told investors at a December conference. “So as we climb these cell towers, we turn up the spectrum. By the time we get to end of 2019, we will have increased the capacity on AT&T’s network by 50%. I mean, you just have to pause and think about this. The entire AT&T wireless network capacity is going to increase over the next 14 months by 50%. I mean, that’s huge.”

Some areas have already received partial upgrades, others may find newly improved rural coverage as AT&T meets its commitments to the government’s FirstNet platform, which calls for more robust rural coverage. Some areas that never had AT&T coverage before may get it for the first time.

AT&T’s biggest competitor, Verizon, has commanded a lead in 4G LTE coverage from 2010 forward after utilizing a considerable amount of its available spectrum for the faster standard. But Verizon has not been a robust bidder for new spectrum recently, except for the millimeter wave frequencies it bought for its emerging 5G network. It has some additional unused AWS-3 spectrum it can use for expansion, but Piecyk believes Verizon may already be using those frequencies in many markets where it is likely facing a spectrum crunch.

While AT&T lights up 60 MHz of additional spectrum, Verizon is primarily depending on the ongoing conversion of 10-15 MHz of existing spectrum it now uses for 3G service to LTE each year. But the company is reportedly running out of frequencies in areas where data demand requires that extra spectrum the most.

The only short term solution for Verizon, which is not participating in marketing hoopla like 5GE, is to make its current spectrum more efficient. That means more cell towers sharing the same frequencies to reduce the load on each tower, improved antenna technology, and using newly available spectrum in the CBRS and millimeter wave bands to manage network traffic. Verizon may even use unlicensed shared spectrum to handle some of the load. Unfortunately, smartphones equipped to take advantage of these new bands are not yet available and may not be until 2020.

For AT&T, improved network performance is seen as a key to resume robust growth in new subscribers.  After Verizon dramatically improved its LTE network in 2014, AT&T stopped growing its lucrative post-paid phone subscriber base, according to Piecyk. Now it may be AT&T’s chance to turn the tables on Verizon.

This AT&T produced video helps consumers understand what 5G, beam forming, small cells, and coverage differences between 4G and 5G are all about. Notice the 5G trial speed test showed download speeds topping out at around 137 Mbps. (4:26)

AT&T will complete its fiber buildout to areas designated to get fiber to the home service by mid-2019, according to AT&T executives.

John J. Stephens, AT&T’s chief financial officer, told investors on a quarterly conference call that AT&T is on schedule to complete expansion of its fiber to the home commitment to 12.5 million new customer locations, a regulator-required commitment imposed on AT&T in return for approval of its acquisition of DirecTV.

“We are getting near the end of our fiber build project, which is basically laying the foundation for stabilizing our broadband and TV business profits in 2019,” added AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson.

AT&T’s expansion has targeted millions of customer locations for fiber to the home service, replacing the fiber to the neighborhood technology AT&T used for several years to support its U-verse service. AT&T officials say its fiber network will reach more than one million new customers during 2018. That network is key to two AT&T initiatives – its emerging 5G wireless service, which requires fiber connections to cell towers, and AT&T Fiber and its broadband offerings — helping boost internet and online video revenue.

“This shift to fiber is beginning to drive IP broadband ARPU growth,” said John M. Donovan, CEO of AT&T Communications, Inc. “The strategic pivot we’re making with video, combined with our execution with fiber gives us the confidence that we will stabilize Entertainment Group [profitability] next year.”

AT&T Fiber is critical to the company’s ability to compete in the home broadband market against cable operators that have recently boosted internet speeds. AT&T’s hybrid fiber-copper U-verse system proved inadequate to match the significantly faster internet speeds many cable operators are rolling out. But AT&T Fiber will not reach all the company’s landline customers. Rural areas are unlikely to ever receive fiber upgrades and AT&T has had long-term plans to scrap its rural landline network, transitioning those customers to wireless voice and internet using AT&T’s 4G LTE network.