Daniel Frankel

Americans are paying almost as much for connected living room services as they are for electricity, natural gas and water, according to TiVo's Q4 Video Trends Report. TiVo's latest survey said that US consumers who still take traditional bundled video are spending, on average, $124.40 a month for pay TV and broadband, up 11 percent in the six months from when TiVo conducted its Q2 report in 2021. Add to that a bill Netflix and other subscription streaming services, and pay TV consumers are forking out an average of $203.60 a month for internet and video entertainment.

The number of US broadband users who regularly push the upper limits of their provisioned internet speed at the 9 pm hour increased 400 percent from May 2020 - September 2021, according to new data provided by analytics and software provider OpenVault. The phenomenon is known as "speed clipping." OpenVault says it occurs most often with multiple members of a subscribing household simultaneously taxing the network with high-bandwidth applications such as video streaming, video gaming and video conferencing.

The average Charter Communications broadband-only customer is now using 700 gigabytes of data per month, according to Christopher Winfrey, the cable operator’s CFO. Winfrey said the high level of wireline broadband usage is the No. 1 reason wireless companies won’t be able to pry broadband marketshare from cable with fixed wireless products. “The average wireless customers uses only 10 gigs a month,” Winfrey said. “The difference in utilization rates is significant.

Perhaps no chief executive lobbied harder than Comcast’s Brian Roberts for the Federal Communications Commission's 2017 rollback of net neutrality rules under Trump-appointed FCC Chairman Ajit Pai.

Four Indiana cities, including Indianapolis, have jointly filed suit in a local state court, seeking to collect “franchise fees” usually charged to cable operators from Netflix and several other video operators, none of which are cable providers. Defendants also include Disney Plus and Hulu, as well as satellite TV companies DirecTV and Dish Network.

After turning the data-usage meter off for the last three months of the pandemic quarantine period, Comcast has restored its limit on residential broadband usage for most customers. But Comcast will now allow subscribers to use 1.2 terabytes of data before it imposes additional charges, as opposed to the pre-pandemic limit of 1 TB. The limit was imposed July 1. Comcast said it will now allow users to exceed the limit during one month without charges — it was previously offering two months’ worth of mulligans.

AT&T has set an ambitious agenda to gain 50% market share within three years in the regions where it has launched fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) service. “We have proof of how we do this historically,” said Jeffrey McElfresh. “As you look at the fiber that we built out in the ground in 2016, at the three-year mark, we roughly approach about a 50% share gain in that territory.

The top 16 US high-speed internet providers, covering 96% of the market, added 370,000 customers in the second quarter, off from the 480,000 added on a pro forma basis in the same period of 2018, according to new research from Leichtman Research Group. The dip is an anomaly for now—customers growth metrics were up for landline broadband suppliers in the first quarter. Cable operators added 532,211 high-speed internet users in Q2, LRG said, about 90% of what they added in the same period of 2018.

The Department of Justice reportedly talked to representatives from Comcast and Charter recently about filling the void of the fourth major US wireless carrier that would be created if T-Mobile and Sprint are allowed to merge. Apparently, as a condition for approving T-Mobile’s $26.5 billion acquisition bid for Sprint, the DOJ wants the Number 3 & 4 wireless companies to divest wireless spectrum and enable a fourth US major wireless carrier. For their part, Comcast and Charter both have nascent mobile services through mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) agreements with Verizon.

Charter Communications Chairman and CEO Tom Rutledge explained why 5G isn’t an existential threat to cable’s connectivity business. “We have a better platform to deploy [5G] technology, I think, than the cellular industry does because we are fully distributed from a high-capacity wireline perspective,” said Rutledge. “If you think about what 5G is, it is small cells,” Rutledge added. “Small cells mean you needs lots of wired line connectivity to make the small cells work. We think we are actually in a better position to do that than traditional cellular companies.