RWA Wants Access to Verizon’s Mobile Agreement with Mediacom

WASHINGTON, June 10, 2025 – The Rural Wireless Association pushed back Thursday against Verizon’s efforts to deny it access to its mobile service agreement with Mediacom.

“The fact that Verizon filed an objection to RWA’s request to access its [mobile resale agreement with Mediacom] raises a more troubling concern that resellers, such as Mediacom, may be receiving more favorable rates, terms, and conditions than rural carrier roaming partners of Verizon, despite the fact that the underlying network usage – whether for resale or roaming – is functionally identical,” RWA outside counsel Carri Bennet and Stephen Sharbaugh wrote in a letter to the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday, June 5.

The spat between Verizon and RWA comes in the midst of an ongoing FCC review of the merger between T-Mobile and UScellular.

As part of that review, the FCC asked Mediacom Communications in April to provide a copy of its August 2023 mobile virtual network operators (MVNO) wholesale agreement with Verizon. It is this agreement, which Mediacom sent to the FCC in May, that RWA seeks to access.

RWA, which represents rural wireless carriers with fewer than two million subscribers, also pushed back against Verizon’s claims “that outside counsel for RWA might improperly use or share the contents of Mediacom’s MVNO wholesale agreement,” calling such claims “unfounded.” 

Verizon had previously argued that since the wireless wholesale industry is composed of “a limited and highly specialized group of interested parties – including outside counsel and consultants who specialize in telecommunications law and the economics of the industry,” those parties may at some future date be engaged “by Verizon’s direct competitors, the company’s MVNO partners, and/or their competitors,” and thus jeopardize Verizon’s competitive standing.

Verizon also claimed that its wholesale agreements “contain information that is at the apex of competitive sensitivity, and are even more sensitive than typical Highly Confidential Information,” a characterization RWA called “unsupported” and one which “would create a dangerous precedent.”

RWA’s concerns come as two of the largest cable companies with existing Verizon mobile resale agreements – Charter Communications and Cox Communications – move forward with plans to merge their mobile operations.

Both companies already operate as MVNOs using Verizon’s network. The proposed merger has raised additional questions about whether Verizon was offering more favorable wholesale terms to large cable partners than to smaller, rural roaming partners.

“The Commission itself requested these materials,” RWA counsel wrote. “The FCC’s request for such agreements validates their relevance to assessing the competitive landscape and how it may be impacted by the proposed transaction.”