After more than a year of enticing the cable industry with the promise of a bundled wireless offering, Sprint has its first bite from an MSO. Time Warner Cable has launched a commercial trial of wireless services in Kansas City to create the first "quadruple play" bundle in the cable industry.

Though not exactly a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO)--Sprint is still branding the service--the two companies have taken steps to more tightly integrate the wireline and wireless services: they've integrated customer service under one number and, most significantly, Time Warner is allowing free calling between its VoIP home phone and the Sprint handset.

While Sprint has been touting the fact it can do a lot more wirelessly for an MSO running VoIP--from enhanced SIP features to shared content to remote programming of a home DVR--the Time Warner trial is rather conservative. According to Sprint vice president of carrier markets Jim Patterson, Sprint and Time Warner are starting off slowly, ensuring they can integrate customer service and billing before tackling the complicated technical issues of integrating a cable network with Sprint's multitude of wireless access products.

"We have everything you can imagine on our roadmap," Patterson said. "We just have to start somewhere."

One thing is certain, it won't just be Sprint and Time Warner tracking this trial. Cable operators have been hovering about the wireless lately, neither committing to nor denying interest in becoming their own MVNOs. The integration possibilities for such deals are immense, since most of them are building their telephony networks from scratch using VoIP, which neatly fits right into the IMS-based cores Sprint and many other carriers are implementing.

We're not just talking about giving your cell phone and your home phone the same number, but content distribution deals that could turn 3G phones into mini-premium cable receptacles and the possibility of taking cable broadband outside of the home with EV-DO. One of the possibilities Sprint gets particularly excited about is the possibility of the handset acting as a remote control for a digital video recorder at home--instead of calling the hubby from the car and telling him to record American Idol, you can tell your DVR directly.

Apparently, we'll have to wait a little longer to see those services, which isn't really that surprising. The cable industry isn't really known for its rapid deployment of new services (it took them almost a decade to launch a proper voice service, after all), but to their credit when they do get a service out the door, i.e. broadband, they go to town.

Contact me at kfitchard@primediabusiness.com.