Cable Companies Walk From Sprint's Pivot
Three U.S. cable operators are hanging up on a joint venture with
Sprint-Nextel
(S) - Get Report
, although shares of the wireless carrier surged Wednesday on the possibility of adding more subscribers.
Comcast
(CMCSA) - Get Report
,
Time Warner Cable
(TWC)
, and
Cox Communications
said they will end marketing for their Pivot service, which was established in November 2005 as an attempt to add a mobile phone offering to the cable companies' triple play service bundle.
The cable companies said they will give Pivot subscribers the option to swap to a traditional Sprint wireless plan. Shares of Sprint soared on the news, rising 62 cents, or 8.8%, to $7.67.
"We are going to being rolling our Pivot subscribers over to traditional Sprint wireless plans," Time Warner Cable spokesperson Alex Dudley told
TheStreet.com
. "Notices will go out in the next couple weeks and we'll make the migration as soon as we can."
Comcast also confirmed it was transitioning subscribers to traditional wireless plans.
In late 2007, both Comcast and Time Warner Cable told analysts and investors that they were seeing very little demand for the Pivot offer. In November 2007, Sprint halted a plan push Pivot into 10 new markets, which hinted that the cable partnership was in trouble.
Among other wireless carriers,
Verizon
(VZ) - Get Report
was up 1.5% at $36.26,
AT&T
(T) - Get Report
added 1.9% to $38.53, and
Qwest
(Q)
tacked on 0.2% to $4.59.