Craig Cowden, the most high-profile wireless engineering executive amid Charter Communication's emergence into the U.S. wireless business over the last seven years, will exit the company at the end of March, the cable operator confirmed.

LightReading, which first reported the news, quoted Cowden as describing the exit as amicable. He said simply that "it's time to do something different" after developing Spectrum Mobile and its MVNO offload strategy.

Cowden, who operates under the title of senior VP of wireless technology, joined Charter in 2016 when the cable operator closed its purchase of Bright House Networks. He had joined that MSO in 2009 after an eight-year stint with Sprint.

Cowden now sits on the board of Federated Wireless, a company that specializes in CBRS spectrum management and which is partly funded by Charter. A believer in the inevitability of private wireless networks, Cowden has been a key executive leader as Charter has developed use cases for the Citizens Band Radio Service (CBRS) spectrum.

As for Spectrum Mobile, it launched at the end of June 2018 and is now one of the fastest growing entities in the U.S. wireless business, touting 4.7 million lines of service as of the end of Q3 2022. ■

Charter Communications’ top wireless executive, Craig Cowden, said the cable operator is looking to follow Comcast’s model of dual-purposing residential customer modems as WiFi hotspots.

“We see a benefit of doing that,” Cowden said, speaking last week at FierceWireless’ Next Gen Wireless Networks Summit in Dallas.

Like Comcast does with Xfinity Mobile, Charter offloads expensive MVNO cellular traffic on the Verizon network by using its network of WiFi hotspots. But Comcast’s public hotspot reach is much bigger, with much of 19 million hotspots across its footprint coming from residential customer routers which offer dual-purpose public WiFi support.

“We already offload significant traffic onto WiFi,” Cowden said. “Comcast has 19 million hotspots that are called home-as-a-hotspot, using the existing router in the home.

He added, “We’re always looking at how we can optimize the cost structure of our products.”

Cowden also spoke about Charter’s plan to use Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) spectrum to create its own pockets of cellular access, from which it could offload MVNO traffic to customers who are equipped with dual-SIM phones.

Charter is currently testing that model in New York and Los Angeles.

“We have done a lot of testing with small cells using dual SIM,” Cowden said. “We tested CBRS in 2017 in Tampa and Charlotte. We had eight different vendors just to test how CBRS would work. At end of 2018 and through now, we’ve done the next phase of dual SIM testing in New York and Los Angeles, where we have prototype devices to test the seamless switching between small cells and the macro domain.”

NEW ORLEANS - Charter Communications, which is currently testing a variety of uses cases of CBRS, could potentially be ready to go to market around the end of next year with an application that enables cost-effective deployment of fixed network services in rural areas.

So said Craig Cowden, senior VP of wireless tech Charter, speaking at a Light Reading-sponsored morning event this morning (Oct. 2) at the SCTE-ISBE Cable-Tec Expo convention.

Charter is currently testing the use of Citizens Broadband Radio Service in North Carolina—a market, Cowden said was selected on purpose "because we wanted a worst-case scenario for RF distribution.”

The MSO, he noted, is looking to extend fixed wireless services within the rural buffers of its footprint, but beyond the feasible reach of its hybrid fiber-coaxial network. With the FCC having just green-lit initial commercial deployment of CBRS, Charter is looking to deliver the minimum broadband speed specifications—25 Mbps downstream and 3 Mbps—while also offering customers in the newly claimed fixed wireless terrain triple-play services.

Assuming successful testing, Corden said initial CBRS-based fixed wireless services could start rolling out around the end of 2020.

Notably, Charter recently settled with the state of New York State, after the state sued the cable company for not fulfilling a merger-related promise to bring rural broadband to the region.

Speaking at an investor event last month, chairman and CEO Tom Rutledge said Charter is currently building out some low-density broadband in New York. “We find that it’s economic. There may be an opportunity to accelerate low-density construction on the fringes of our business going forward.”

Separately, Charter is also testing CBRS in New York and Los Angeles as a means of shifting some cellular network usage for its Spectrum Mobile product off the Verizon MVNO. The scheme Charter is testing uses dual-SIMM phones that can switch between MVNO cellular and Charter’s own CBRS-based LTE network.

“We see targeted opportunities for mobile offload,” he said. “Our data shows that something like 85% of outdoor mobile traffic takes place in 15% of geographic locations.”