Faced with competition from fixed wireless access (FWA), fiber and increasingly low earth orbit satellite, cable internet service providers are responding by trying to starve FWA of spectrum it needs in the 3, 6, 7 and 8 GHz bands, consultant Richard Bennett wrote last week. Cable is also trying to siphon BEAD funding from fiber by directing it at less-powerful technologies like SpaceX's Starlink, he said. In addition, cable is improving its service by tackling "its painful asymmetry," he said. "Broadband doesn’t need to be equal speeds up and down, but 40 Mbps up and 1.2 Gbps down is ridiculous." DOCSIS 4.0 technology is developing slowly, Bennett said, and marketing it will necessitate a sales pitch very different from cable's traditional emphasis on download speeds, while ignoring everything else.
PBS unquestionably was supposed to see a hike in its royalty fees in 2015-17, and the Library of Congress' Copyright Royalty Board wrongly created a new method that disproportionately affected PBS, it told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. PBS and sports leagues are suing the CRB (docket 24-1260), challenging its 2024 cable royalty funds distribution decision. In its initial brief, PBS said the growth in public broadcasting content on distant cable TV systems should have driven higher royalties. Moreover, PBS said the CRB judges adopted a model that cut the value of signals transmitted by cable system operators that paid the minimum fee required, but they didn't apply that model evenly to everyone claiming copyright royalty fees. In their joint initial brief, the sports league appellants said the board purported to split the difference between two competing methodologies, when even the CRB recognized that neither measured the relative marketplace value of each claimant's programming. "The result was the definition of arbitrary, and it must be vacated," they said. Filing a separate joint appeal were the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball, NBA, NFL, NHL, WNBA and NCAA.
Mounting net subscriber losses made 2024 the worst year ever for cable's broadband business, but there are reasons for optimism in 2025, MoffettNathanson's Craig Moffett told investors last week. The rate of growth and share gain of fixed wireless access and fiber overbuilding are "unmistakably decelerating," he said. Moreover, subscriber losses should be much smaller this year, especially with the end of the Affordable Connectivity Program no longer hurting results. He said AT&T entering the fixed wireless market hasn't fully offset the deceleration of Verizon and T-Mobile in that space. It's doubtful whether the pace of fiber overbuilding continues, he said, adding SpaceX's Starlink satellite broadband will likely remain a player in rural markets only.
Download speeds of Comcast's and Charter's mobile services have increased more than 100 Mbps in the past two years, driven by the cable operators offloading some traffic onto their Wi-Fi networks, Ookla said Tuesday. Ookla examined 2023 and 2024 internet speed test data for the two cable operators. Charter Spectrum Mobile customers have seen median download speeds go from 84.35 Mbps to 188.63 Mbps, it said. Comcast Xfinity Mobile users saw download speeds increase from 66.60 Mbps in Q3 2023 to 170.39 Mbps a year later. Hardware improvements, such as Comcast upgrading its network from DOCSIS 3.1 to DOCSIS 4.0, and the ongoing replacement of older handsets with newer ones, will continue to result in better customer experience, it said.
Fiber has been part of cable networks for years, and is taking on increasing importance as cable operators use its capabilities in new ways, CableLabs Principal Architect Matt Schmitt wrote Tuesday. Cable operators are moving fiber portions of their networks from analog to digital, as well as pushing fiber deeper into the networks and closer to the customer, he wrote.
New York state's Mid-Hudson Fiber has set 1 Gbps symmetrical as its minimum plan speed, it said Friday. Existing customers will be upgraded automatically at no additional cost.
Cable One, with a 45% ownership stake in Mega Broadband Investments/Vyve Broadband, has amended the terms of its Vyve investment to give it better timing flexibility for a takeover of that company, Cable One said last week. Under the amended partnership agreement, Cable One said it paid $250 million to other Vyve equity holders, who also received the proceeds from $100 million of new Vyve debt. That $350 million will reduce the purchase price payable by Cable One, it said. Cable One said it has an option to call the 55% of Vyve it doesn't own, which it can exercise starting in Q3 2025.
The worst of Charter Communications' loss of broadband subscribers has likely passed, MoffettNathanson's Craig Moffett wrote Thursday. Fixed wireless access growth should slow, and the pace of fiber overbuilds will moderate, he said. Mobile and broadband revenue should accelerate. "To be sure, we don’t expect Charter to reclaim the growth rates it enjoyed post-COVID," he said, adding he expects revenue growth in the low to mid-single digit percentages.
Cable operators moving to 10G won't max out their legacy hybrid fiber coaxial networks, as they have 15 to 20 years of capacity growth in them, Vecima Chief Technology Officer Colin Howlett said Thursday during an SCTE webinar. In addition, Howlett said cable operators will make a variety of DOCSIS 4.0 announcements in 2025, complementing the Comcast/Charter Communications/Broadcom announcement in September that they're collaborating on a unified DOCSIS chipset for such equipment as modems and nodes. A lot of cable operators that were planning DOCSIS 3.1 upgrades instead may reevaluate those plans and go with the DOCSIS 4.0 specification, enabled by those chipsets, he said.
Comcast Business Services is buying managed services provider Nitel, with the aim of using Nitel's services to expand its presence in connectivity, global secure networking and advanced technology, Comcast said Wednesday. It didn't disclose financial terms.