Charter plans to leverage one of its competitive advantages and offer wireless backup to residential broadband customers. This service would mean an automatic rollover to cellular data any time Charter’s normal broadband connection goes down.

Charter started to offer this service to businesses during the pandemic in 2020. Charter charges businesses $20 per month for the service. Charter provides business customers using the service with a cellular modem that includes a SIM card. The modem includes up to eight hours of battery backup, meaning that it will kick in when customers lose power – and benefits customers who have backup power for their computers. Customers get unlimited usage while using the cellular network.

The cellular backup doesn’t provide a full-replacement backup. Speeds are going to be a lot slower than the broadband provided by Charter’s HFC network. Functions like static IP will likely not be connected through the wireless connection. The service will only work for customers who can receive a good cell signal from Charter. Charter has begun using some of its own cellular frequencies in parts of some markets, but Charter’s cell service is mostly provided using the Verizon network. I happen to be a Charter broadband customer, but I also live in a total dead zone for Verizon cellular, so this backup service wouldn’t work for me.

Charter’s announcement said that Charter would be offering this to residential customers on similar terms as for businesses. We don’t know yet if this also means $20 per month. This service will be of interest to those who are badly disadvantaged by broadband outages. This makes great sense for a retail store, for example, which might lose the ability to accept credit cards during a broadband outage. It seems likely that a business might benefit from the service even for one or two Charter outages per year.

I have to wonder who this will benefit in the residential market? I lose Charter broadband from time to time, and I always switch my computer to use data from my cellphone. The change takes a few minutes to restore broadband. What goes dark during a Charter outage is the TV and any other devices in our house that rely on broadband. While we have a ton of WiFi devices in the house, none of them are critical. For example, we don’t have smoke detectors or doorbell cameras that rely on WiFi. I imagine folks who rely on WiFi for such devices might be interested in the wireless backup service. Like most homes, I don’t have a backup generator for power outages, so this service wouldn’t give me any real benefit during a power outage.

The product does raise an interesting question. I live in a city where the vast majority of homes use either Charter or AT&T for home broadband. I have to think that any time that one of these ISPs has a broadband network crash, a lot of people switch to a cellular network. It’s hard to think that those networks don’t get super busy and slow down during broadband outages. The Charter service will drive even more people to the Verizon cellular network. Perhaps the cellular networks are more robust than I imagine, but it has to be burden when the cellular networks are suddenly inundated by a lot of normal home and business broadband customers using cellular data.