It didn’t take long for somebody say they will have a 6G cellular product. Somebody has jumped the gun every time there has been migration to a new cellular standard, and I remember the big cellular companies making claims about having 4G LTE technology years before it was actually available.

But this time it’s not a cellular company talking about 6G – it’s Charter, the second largest US cable company. Charter is already in the process of implementing LTE cellular through the resale of wholesale minutes from Verizon – so they will soon be a cellular provider. If we look at the early success of Comcast they might do well since Charter has almost 24 million broadband customers.

Tom Rutledge, the Charter CEO made reference to 5G trials being done by the company, but also went on to tout a new Charter product as 6G. What Rutledge is really talking about is a new product that will put a cellular micro cell in a home that has Charter broadband. This hot spot would provide strong cellular coverage within the home and use the cable broadband network for backhaul for the calls.

Such a network would benefit Charter by collecting a lot of cellular minutes that Charter wouldn’t have to buy wholesale from Verizon. Outside of the home customers would roam on the Verizon network, but within the home all calls would route over the landline connection. Presumably, if the home cellular micro transmitters are powerful enough, neighbors might also be able to get cellular access if they are Charter cellular customers. This is reminiscent of the Comcast WiFi hotspots that broadcast from millions of their cable modems.

This is not a new idea. For years farmers have been buying cellular repeaters from AT&T and Verizon to boost their signal if they live near the edge of cellular coverage. These products also use the landline broadband connection as backhaul – but in those cases the calls route to one of the cellular carriers. But in this configuration Charter would intercept all cellular traffic and presumably route the calls themselves. There are also a number of cellular resellers who have been using landline backhaul to provide low-cost calling.

This would be the first time that somebody has ever contemplated this on a large scale. One can picture large volumes of Charter cellular micro sites in areas where they are the incumbent cable company. When enough homes have transmitters they might almost create a ubiquitous cellular network that is landline based – eliminating the need for cellular towers.

It’s an interesting concept. A cable company in some ways is already well positioned to implement a more traditional small cell cellular network. Once they have upgraded to DOCSIS 3.1 they can place a small cell site at any pole that is already connected to the cable network. For now the biggest hurdle to such a deployment is the small data upload speeds for the first generation of DOCSIS 3.1, but cable labs has already released a technology that will enable faster upload speeds, up to synchronous connections. Getting faster upload speeds means finding some more empty channel slots on the cable network and could be a challenge in some networks.

The most interesting thing about this idea is that anybody with a broadband network could offer cellular service in the same way if they can make a deal to buy wholesale minutes. But therein lies the rub. While there are now hundreds of ‘cellular’ companies, only a few of them own their own cellular networks and everybody else is reselling. Charter is large enough to probably feel secure about having access to long-term cellular minutes from the big cellular companies. But very few other landline ISPs are going to get that kind of locked arrangement.

I’ve always advised clients to be wary of any resell opportunity because the business can change on a dime when the underlying provider changes the rules of the game. Our industry is littered with examples of companies that went under when the large resale businesses they had built lost their wholesale product. The biggest such company that comes to mind was Talk America that had amassed over a million telephone customers on resold lines from the big telcos. But there are many other examples of paging resellers, long distance resellers and many other telco product reselling that only lasted as long as the underlying network providers agreed to supply the commodity. But this is such an intriguing idea that many landline ISPs are going to look at what Charter is doing and wonder why they can’t do the same.