The $34.1 billion Charter Communications/Cox Communications deal announced Friday (see 2505160060) is a strategic adaptation to changing competitive pressures in the cable ISP marketplace, not an attempt to monopolize markets, wrote Eric Fruits, a senior scholar at the International Center for Law & Economics. The newly combined company will need sizable efficiencies to remain viable in the changing marketplace, he said Tuesday. Charter and Cox have little footprint overlap, so the geographic expansion of the combined company would give it greater scale across different regions. The possibility that the FCC's review of the deal could look at the companies’ diversity, equity and inclusion policies exemplifies "the troubling politicization of regulatory processes," he added. "Such mission creep undermines rule-of-law principles and creates regulatory uncertainty that harms investment." He said DOJ and FCC reviews should focus on "demonstrable, transaction-specific competitive harms, rather than abstract concerns about size or concentration." With the two companies having limited geographic overlap and facing intense competition in broadband and video, "the standard for proving harm should be appropriately rigorous."

Faced with competition from telcos with much bigger footprints than cable due to fiber and fixed wireless, cable operators need to consider mergers and acquisitions to compete, Dell'Oro Group's Jeff Heynen wrote Friday. Charter's proposed purchase of Cox Communications (see 2505160060) came as a surprise, "but the notion that cable operators had to fight back by getting bigger was certainly not." Merging two of the largest cable operators will result in consolidation among equipment vendors too, as they look to grow their share at the newly combined company, he wrote.

Comcast is generally well-insulated against a recession, though revenue from its theme parks and advertising is vulnerable, Chief Financial Officer Jason Armstrong said Thursday. Speaking at MoffettNathanson's Media, Internet and Communications Conference, Armstrong said the company hasn't seen signs of a weakening economy yet. In addition, he said 90% of the traffic on Comcast's Xfinity Mobile business is offloaded onto its Wi-Fi network, a greater percentage than wireless companies offload. Comcast uses its citizens broadband radio service spectrum in particularly high-density areas to offload more of that traffic, lowering its mobile virtual network operator costs, Armstrong said. As Comcast continues to scale up its wireless offering, it can offload more traffic using the CBRS spectrum, he added. Comcast expects to eventually see fiber competition "in the vast majority of our footprint." By comparison, fixed wireless and SpaceX's Starlink will represent some competition, but they're capacity constrained, he said.

Cable One stock cratered Friday -- closing at $152.51, down $112.20 --- after the company's latest earnings saw declines in its broadband subscribership and the suspension of its quarterly dividend to shareholders. Cable One said Q1 revenue was $380.6 million, compared with $404.3 million in Q1 2024. The decline was largely driven by shrinking residential broadband and video subscriber numbers. The cable provider said it ended Q1 with 945,000 residential data customers, versus 967,000 in Q1 2024; 101,000 residential video customers, versus 126,000; and 65,000 residential voice subscribers, down from 76,000.

Charter Communications crossed the 10 million mobile lines mark in Q1 with its Xfinity Mobile service, ending the quarter with 10.4 million, it said Friday as it announced its latest financial results. With 2.1 million mobile lines added in the past year, Charter is the nation’s fastest-growing mobile provider, CEO Chris Winfrey said in a call with analysts.

The pay-TV set-top box market will continue contracting through the remainder of the decade, going from $8.6 billion in 2023 to $5.5 billion by 2030, ABI Research said Tuesday. It said the biggest decline during that span will be in North America.

Comcast is offering a five-year price guarantee for subscribers signing up for Xfinity internet, it said Tuesday. The package includes a mobile line and starts at $55 a month.

The Q4 2024 inflation adjustment figure for cable operators using Form 1240 is 2.34%, said the FCC Media Bureau and Office of Economics and Analytics in Monday's Daily Digest. In the year-ago quarter it was 1.63%.

Section 18 of the FTC Act, which gives the agency power to establish rules that specifically define deceptive acts or practices, limits its rulemaking ability, and "click to cancel" is anything but specific, since it applies to a lot of contracts across the economy, petitioners told the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday. NCTA and others are challenging "click to cancel" (see 2411220029). In a reply brief (docket 24-3137) to the FTC's response (see 2503170039), the petitioners said the FTC hasn't identified instances of problems commensurate with the rule’s economy-wide scope. They said the FTC's response also doesn't address the arbitrary and capricious aspects of the rule, such as how the agency downplayed the effects of the rule. There's no legal authority backing the FTC's request that the court limit relief to certain parts of the rule or to certain parties, they added.

U.S. cable operators should adopt a fiber-to-the-premises strategy to deal with increased fiber and fixed wireless competition, Analysys Mason's Simon Sherrington said during the consultancy's podcast Wednesday. Cable networks today pass 86% of U.S. residences, but fiber-based broadband providers will pass more than 75% of homes by 2030, creating "a huge cable and FTTP overlap" and putting even more competitive pressure on cable, Sherrington said. The fiber plans of Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile would give them more than 100 million homes passed by 2030. While a lot of cable operators outside the U.S. are overbuilding their networks with FTTP, there's more focus in the U.S. on using DOCSIS technology to increase bandwidth and improve speeds, he added.