"These are really good customers," Charter CEO Chris Winfrey said during his company's quarterly earnings call, in response to a question on the topic. However, Charter officials argued recently that they don't expect much churn among their Spectrum One customers after their first year of service. Those kinds of price increases can cause customers to move elsewhere. Skiadas is likely referring to promotions such as Charter's Spectrum One that offers 12 months of introductory pricing and then increases pricing thereafter. When a customer gets the bill in month 13, we'll see where it goes. When asked to elaborate, Skiadas said that "we've seen the movie on free lines and we know how that goes. "They've been successful with free lines, and we'll see how that goes in year two when the customer gets the surprise in year two," he said in response to a question about cable companies gaining share in the wireless industry. However, Skiadas cast some doubt on how the cable companies might increase their share in the coming months and years. Those partnerships have allowed Comcast, Charter Communications and others to launch mobile services that have taken the US wireless industry by storm in recent years. "Their product is probably about half the speed of our 5G product," he boasted.īut Gogo now expects to launch its 5G service in the middle of next year – well past the company's initial goal to offer 5G services at the end of 2021.ĭuring his comments Wednesday at an investor event, Verizon CFO Tony Skiadas discussed Verizon's ongoing MVNO partnerships with cable companies including Comcast and Charter. He also sought to reassure investors that Gogo's move to 5G is still important, partly to win new customers and partly to blunt the threat posed by rival SmartSky. "While this is very disappointing, one has to understand that 5G chips are difficult to design and build," Oakleigh Thorne, Gogo's CEO, explained during the company's recent quarterly conference call, according to Seeking Alpha. Partly as a result, Gogo reduced its 2023 revenue expectations to between $410 million and $420 million, down from prior guidance between $440 million and $455 million. The company's CEO called it "the most disappointing news of the year." The financial analysts at Raymond James called it "clearly frustrating." Late last month, Gogo announced another delay in the development of its 5G chipset. Those difficulties stretch from regulators at the FCC to fabrication companies allied with Samsung to officials at a small chip-design company based in San Jose, California.įor Gogo, the troubles seem endless. Top executives at Gogo recently offered some insights into the difficulties the company continues to face in its four-year quest to upgrade its network to #5g. Gogo opens up about its 5G troubles | Light Reading Gogo has already upgraded all of its 250 towers with 5G equipment and just needs the chip to complete the work.īut why go with GCT and not one of the market's big, established 5G chipset providers like Qualcomm or MediaTek? "We were too small for them," Thorne said. "The con is that we have borne some technology risk in doing so," he explained.īut he said he continues to expect that work to be finished in time for a 5G launch next year. It's important work, he said, because 5G will increase the speeds of Gogo's inflight Internet service from around 25 Mbit/s to up to 80 Mbit/s. Thorne said GCT, based in San Jose, is working to fix the chip. A detailed root cause analysis was conducted by GCT and it ascertained that all three issues were related to the same root cause, a software issue in the peripheral sub-block of the chip, not an issue in the 5G block." "As the chip was being brought up after fabrication by Samsung, there were three issues identified in the system block of the chip. And Samsung designates a sub-design house to develop the more standard blocks of the chip outside the 5G and 4G blocks designed by GCT," explained Gogo's CEO, Oakleigh Thorne. They in turn use Samsung to fabricate those chips. They in turn have a chip supplier GCT, one of a few firms focused on developing 5G chips. "Our supplier of 5G airborne and ground station radio technology is Airspan Networks. But due to technical glitches, Gogo has delayed the launch of its #5g network several times over the past few years. Gogo is struggling to obtain suitable equipment from its suppliers.
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