Malone: Charter Could Create Third Wireless Player

Liberty Media chairman John Malone said a lot of things at his companies’ rapid-fire annual meetings on Tuesday — he held four in less than an hour and a half for Liberty Media, Liberty Interactive, Liberty Trip Advisor Holdings and Liberty Broadband — but perhaps most interesting was his theory that the recent pairing of Charter Communications and Time Warner Cable could help create a third major wireless carrier to compete with Verizon and AT&T.

Malone pointed to Time Warner Cable’s MVNO deal with Verizon – part of cable consortium SpectrumCo’s sale of wireless frequencies to Verizon in 2012 for about $3.9 billion. As part of that deal, SpectrumCo’s members – TWC, Comcast, Bright House Networks and Cox – received the option of participating in a wireless MVNO cellular service from Verizon.

Malone noted that Charter was not part of that consortium – it will be after the TWC deal closes – which now becomes more important as the bulk of wireless traffic originates on the cable-dominated WiFi network.

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