Cox Mobile looks to 'ramp volume' in 2024

LAS VEGAS – CES 2024 – Cox Communications is preparing to beef up the promotion and marketing of Cox Mobile as the service heads into its second year in the market, execs said here at a press and analyst event that provided a status report on the company's relatively new offering.

"We must ramp volume," Mark Lawson, executive VP and chief marketing and sales officer of Cox Communications, told Light Reading in an interview. "Awareness across the customer base is still lower than we expect. A big initiative for us this year is to drive awareness that we're in the mobile business."

Lawson's remarks come about a year after Cox, following a softlaunch in a set of markets, launched Cox Mobile across its footprint and confirmed Verizon as its MVNO partner.

Cox Mobile, which requires customers to bundle in Cox's home broadband service, rides Verizon's mobile network in tandem with Cox's footprint of Wi-Fi hotspots. Cox Mobile features unlimited and by-the-gigabyte plans, and now also offers family plans that provide discounts as more lines are added to individual accounts. Cox Mobile currently is running price promotions on Samsung devices and iPhones.

"Operationally, we are super strong," Lawson said. "That will allow us to scale at a pace that we can be very comfortable with in terms of hitting the full marketing engine as we head into 2024."

Part of that marketing and sales push is to ensure that Cox Mobile is represented across every customer touch point. That plan includes additional investing in the Cox sales teams, opening up Cox Mobile to the company's direct sales teams and "creating the right commission plans," Lawson explained.

Cox is also exploring "skinny retail," whereby the company would look to install pop-up kiosks at certain venues, including multiple-dwelling units where Cox already provides video, voice and broadband services, Cox Mobile SVP Tony Krueck said.

Privately held Cox does not disclose subscriber figures, but execs said Cox Mobile's line growth is tracking well, from a scale basis, with what Comcast and Charter Communications saw a year after they launched their respective mobile services, Xfinity Mobile and Spectrum Mobile.

"We've seen good growth. We're on similar trajectories," Krueck said.

Mobile performance linked to the bundle

Mobile is a key component of Cox's ten-year growth plan, Lawson said.

Cox isn't revealing much about mobile revenues and when it expects its mobile initiative to become a profitable contributor to the business. However, the company does not necessarily view the performance of Cox Mobile on a standalone basis since the service is being bundled in with broadband and other services.

"We are looking at the business as a whole," Krueck said. "When you think about the P&L [profit and loss] we are focused on driving total P&L growth.

"We don't necessarily need to look at an individual component of the different product offerings that we have when we're selling bundled offers. When we sell a total bundle, then we look at the profitability of the entire bundle."

Exploring CBRS offload

Cox is pursuing how the operator might use its CBRS spectrum to offload more mobile data and save on MVNO costs in high-usage areas. For now, Cox is using CBRS to test fixed wireless access (FWA) applications and using some of that spectrum for a pilot here in Las Vegas. The company intends to do more with CBRS as its mobile service adds more customers.

"We don't have enough scale at the moment to drive the need for a ton of [CBRS] offload yet," Krueck said. "We're thinking maybe a year or two down the road we'll start to deploy an offload network. But we'll start testing in 2024 doing all of the development work to prepare to start doing some of that offload."