WASHINGTON, June 10, 2025 – The Rural Wi-fi Affiliation pushed back Thursday towards Verizon’s efforts to deny it entry to its cell service settlement with Mediacom.
“The truth that Verizon filed an objection to RWA’s request to entry its [mobile resale agreement with Mediacom] raises a extra troubling concern that resellers, equivalent to Mediacom, could also be receiving extra favorable charges, phrases, and situations than rural service roaming companions of Verizon, although the underlying community utilization – whether or not for resale or roaming – is functionally similar,” RWA outdoors counsel Carri Bennet and Stephen Sharbaugh wrote in a letter to the Federal Communications Fee on Thursday, June 5.
The spat between Verizon and RWA comes within the midst of an ongoing FCC evaluate of the merger between T-Mobile and UScellular.
As a part of that evaluate, the FCC asked Mediacom Communications in April to present a duplicate of its August 2023 cell digital community operators (MVNO) wholesale settlement with Verizon. It’s this settlement, which Mediacom sent to the FCC in May, that RWA seeks to entry.
RWA, which represents rural wireless carriers with fewer than two million subscribers, additionally pushed again towards Verizon’s claims “that outdoors counsel for RWA would possibly improperly use or share the contents of Mediacom’s MVNO wholesale settlement,” calling such claims “unfounded.”
Verizon had previously argued that because the wi-fi wholesale business consists of “a restricted and extremely specialised group of events – together with outdoors counsel and consultants who specialise in telecommunications legislation and the economics of the business,” these events might at some future date be engaged “by Verizon’s direct opponents, the corporate’s MVNO companions, and/or their opponents,” and thus jeopardize Verizon’s aggressive standing.
Verizon additionally claimed that its wholesale agreements “include data that’s on the apex of aggressive sensitivity, and are much more delicate than typical Extremely Confidential Data,” a characterization RWA referred to as “unsupported” and one which “would create a harmful precedent.”
RWA’s considerations come as two of the most important cable corporations with present Verizon cell resale agreements – Constitution Communications and Cox Communications – transfer ahead with plans to merge their cell operations.
Each corporations already function as MVNOs utilizing Verizon’s community. The proposed merger has raised extra questions on whether or not Verizon was providing extra favorable wholesale phrases to massive cable companions than to smaller, rural roaming companions.
“The Fee itself requested these supplies,” RWA counsel wrote. “The FCC’s request for such agreements validates their relevance to assessing the aggressive panorama and the way it could also be impacted by the proposed transaction.”
