Charter Communications' carriage deal struck with Disney last month (see 2309110034) is a road map that can point to broadband benefits for other cable operators and is potentially a way of retaining broadband subscribers in the face of fiber overbuild and fixed wireless competition, Dell'Oro Group Jeff Heynen blogged Monday. The spectrum and bandwidth freed up for Charter in the deal means more bandwidth available for broadband subs, he said. That bandwidth reclamation could be significant for cable operators that never deployed switched digital video, he said. As more video viewers switch to over-the-top services, cable operators are increasingly moving to a role as content aggregators as a means of trying to ensure those nonlinear video subs remain broadband customers, he said.

Shentel is buying Ohio-based fiber network operator Horizon in a $385 million cash and stock deal, the cable operator said Tuesday night. Shentel CEO Christopher French said the Horizon deal lets Shentel accelerate its fiber strategy, doubling the size of its commercial fiber business and creating new opportunities for its Glo Fiber business. Shentel said the deal is expected to close in the first half of 2024, pending regulatory approvals.

Eighty-five percent of Americans are bullish on their residential broadband service, NCTA blogged Monday, citing a Morning Consult survey it commissioned. It said when asked about download speeds, signal strength, cost, security and reliability, big majorities of respondents were satisfied. It said the survey of 2,208 adults was done Aug. 18-21.

Cable operators have been trying to confuse local governments about their obligations, and the FCC hasn't addressed the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' 2021 decision on the agency's 2019 local cable franchise authority order (see 2105260035), localities told Commissioners Anna Gomez and Geoffrey Starks, per a docket 22-69 filing Friday. The NATOA, National League of Cities, U.S. Conference of Mayors and National Association of Counties representatives urged the FCC to implement the court ruling that cable operators charging local governments for franchise obligations need to do so at marginal costs and clarify that local governments should be required to pay the marginal cost of only their use of institutional data networks and not for cable system deployment to serve small businesses and other nonresidential consumers that use institutional networks. The localities also urged repeal of the FCC's mixed use rule, saying the 6th Circuit "found it does not correctly state the law." The localities also said they backed the agency's pending digital discrimination proposals and said local elected officials should have better means for updating the national broadband map to use it to monitor the state of digital discrimination.

Comcast will launch a variety of symmetrical speed broadband tiers in Colorado Springs next week in its first residential rollout of its DOCSIS 4.0 network upgrades, it said Thursday. It said it will offer 300 Mbps, 500 Mbps, 1 Gbps and 2 Gbps symmetrical speed services there. It said the DOCSIS 4.0 rollout will expand to Philadelphia and Atlanta before year's end.

WideOpenWest is expanding its fiber network into Minnesota, with construction to begin in Anoka and Ramsey counties in coming months, it said Tuesday. It said it expects to pass 85,000 homes in Minnesota, and is expanding the number of total homes to be passed as part of its current Greenfield expansion initiative to 345,000. The expansion is part of the company's overall goal of reaching 400,000 additional homes by 2027.

Cable ISP Vyve Broadband closed on its purchases of the commercial arm of Georgia's ATC Broadband and Oklahoma's Community Cable and Broadband, it said this week. Vyve said the ATC deal strengthens its presence in east-central Georgia. It said it plans a network upgrade for CCB to allow faster internet speeds.

Breezeline's Stream TV platform, available in seven states, is expanding to the cable company's Maryland, Virginia and Delaware markets, it said Wednesday. A company spokesperson told us it expects to introduce Stream TV in South Carolina in October, making it available in all Breezeline markets. The company is gradually migrating subscribers of its video legacy service to the cloud-based Stream TV platform, while new video subs are all on Stream TV, he said.

Cable modems successfully linked to cable modem termination system equipment in a test of DOCSIS 4.0 technology interoperability, CableLabs Principal Architect Doug Jones blogged this week. The event, at CableLabs last month, "passed high-speed traffic. Very high speed, as in gigabits-per-second downstream and upstream," he said. Another interoperability session is scheduled for later this month as the cable industry and suppliers "keep pushing a more rigorous and deeper understanding of the DOCSIS 4.0 specifications and product maturity," he said.

Charter Communications has fully rolled out use of citizens broadband radio service band spectrum in one market for offloading mobile traffic from its mobile virtual network operator agreement with Verizon, with plans for a broader CBRS rollout next year, CEO Chris Winfrey said Friday as the company announced Q2 earnings. Charter ended the quarter with 6.6 million residential and small-business mobile lines. Winfrey said more than 11% of its internet customers have its mobile service, and the mobile penetration should sizably grow over the next several years. It ended Q2 2022 with 4.3 million total mobile lines. Charter hopes to land "significant" broadband equity, access and deployment program funding, Winfrey said. BEAD rules are notably different from broadband programs in states where Charter operates, and the company will work with governments on rules "still conducive to private investment," he said. Charter is doing trials of its Xumo video platform, offering unified search across linear and direct-to-consumer offerings, with deployment later this year, Winfrey said. Chief Financial Officer Jessica Fischer said Charter remains on track for 300,000 additional state-subsidized rural passings this year. She said Charter expects to spend $4 billion this year on line extension work, with similar spending likely in 2024 and 2025. Charter had Q2 revenue of $13.7 billion, essentially flat year over year, with internet and mobile service revenue growth offset by declines in video and voice service revenue. It ended the quarter with 28.5 million residential internet customers, up about 300,000 from the same quarter a year earlier; 14.1 million residential video subs, down 780,000; and 7.2 million residential voice subs, down 1 million.