WASHINGTON —Consumer advocates and experienced telecom market watchers are casting a wary eye on the recent cross-media move by Time Warner Cable to sell Sprint wireless services, while Sprint officials see how best to work with the cable industry.

Cable giant Time Warner is involved with Sprint in a trial of reselling the wireless carrier's service, along with its cable TV service in Kansas City, Mo. Initial reaction is good, with analysts saying the move will allow cable companies to offer more complete bundles of services. However, analysts caution that in the long run, this type of offering could dull wireless' competitive viability if repeated too often.

The deal marks one of the first moves by a big cable company to bundle wireless services into its cable service package. The deal isn't really an MVNO agreement, says John Overy, director of business development for Sprint. Rather, it's a little more arms-length. No decision has yet been announced about rolling it out in other cities.

Time Warner will package Sprint-branded wireless service packages, primarily its $35 a month Fair and Flexible plan into its cable and VoIP-phone service/cable programming package. Time Warner will handle the monthly billing for all of the services through its backoffice billing systems, Overy says, but Time Warner customers can access details of their wireless calls through Sprint's Webpage.

Free calling between Time Warner's IP phone and Sprint wireless phones also will be allowed, he says. Time Warner will sell Sprint-branded phones.

The complex deal will give Sprint insight into how effective cable companies are in selling Sprint services, he adds. "It's a hybrid partnership," he says. Sprint's strategy of selling services through other name brands is a carefully considered move, says David Bottoms, vice president of strategic partners at the company. Bottoms says cable companies are just another segment that might offer a lucrative outlet for Sprint wireless services – no different than its MVNO relationships with ESPN and Qwest. He says Sprint isn't concerned about diluting his company's brand name by aligning with a potential telecommunications services competitor like Time Warner. "If my market share was 50 percent, I'd be worried. With as many competitors as there are out there," competitive worries aren't a priority, he says. "It's a logical marriage between wireless and cable."

The deal carries significant symbolism for some, however. Ties that reach across traditional transmission media lines bridging the local/long distance; cable/telephone; wireless/wireline hierarchy are seen as groundbreaking. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was crafted in hopes of throwing the old transmission-based telecom markets into a blender. Such mix-master results haven't been forthcoming.

Consumer advocates see a looming danger in the increasing ties between potential competitors. "The more interconnection between competitors, the less competition," says Mark Cooper, director of research at the Consumer Federation of America. "The cable guys need a wireless option," he says, adding the partnership between Time Warner and Sprint makes business sense. He adds, though, that intermodal competition between cable, wireless and wireline competitors may be a little blunted. The deal makes wireless and wireline competitors part of the same service bundle, he says.

Other market watchers agree the initial competitive impact of this kind of deal is slight or even nonexistent, but there is a danger on the horizon, they say. "If this becomes the principle way people buy their wireless service, wireless could become just another add-on service for larger competitors," says Phil Verveer, partner at Washington telecom law firm Wilkie, Farr and Gallagher. Verveer was lead attorney in the government's antitrust case that broke up AT&T in the 1980s.

"There needs to be independent players offering stand-alone wireless services" instead of being integrated into a bundle offered by a cable company or a big wireline phone company. "If you only have two comprehensive bundles offered by two companies, in the end, that's worse than having five bundles offered by five wireless competitors," Verveer says. "This will, obviously, take several years to sort itself out."