Mike Robuck

Despite subscribers' response to Verizon's 1-Gigabit service, the telco has no plans for offering the faster speed out of the current footprint. Verizon CFO Matt Ellis said his company was "selling a lot of gigabit speed," due in part to the demand for video streaming and other services during the coronavirus pandemic. "If you think about Fios footprint in the essentially the DC to Boston corridor, we're not expanding outside of that geography, but we are seeing strong demand for that product," Ellis said. 

CenturyLink CEO and President Jeff Storey said on the company's Q2 earnings call that he doesn't think things will return to pre-COVID 19 days, but there are now new opportunities. Storey said about 75% of CenturyLink's employees are currently working from home. He told CenturyLink's employees not to expect to return to their offices before early fall. CenturyLink will take a phased approach to employees returning to their office spaces. "Frankly, I don't expect we will ever return to the work from work approach we had prior to the pandemic," Storey said.

Frontier will pay a $900,000 fine to Washington state after the attorney general's office found it has misled customers about internet speeds and charged them undisclosed fees. The bulk of the $900,000 fine will go to former Frontier customers in Washington. Earlier in 2020, Frontier sold its broadband services in three states, including Washington, to Kirkland-based WaveDivision Capital in partnership with Searchlight Capital Partners for $1.35 billion. WaveDivision renamed Frontier Communications Northwest as Ziply Fiber.

AT&T Communications CEO Jeff McElfresh told investors how fiber underpins the company's wireless, broadband and streaming video services, saying it takes a lot of fiber and physical site locations with high densification in order to realize the full potential of the wireless spectrum the company owns. "I can tell you, densification of our wireless network and an increased footprint expansion of our fiber offerings is in the making for AT&T over the next several years." McElfresh said AT&T now has multiple fiber networks that serve and connect its wireless services, enterprise cu

AT&T Business is offering a new broadband service for residence locations that features symmetrical speeds of 1-Gig. AT&T is calling the service "AT&T Home Office Connectivity" and its now available across 21 states via the company's fiber and copper lines. The service includes an internet access line as well as the required equipment that AT&T Business will retain ownership of.

Change is in the air for the telecommunications sector as vendors and service providers grapple with the fallout from COVID-19. While it may be too soon to carve all of the changes into granite, it does seem as though the industry is headed towards the dawning of a new era.  Adding more capacity going forward is top of mind for most service providers. But now that service providers, businesses and other organizations know that their employees can work from home (WFH) how many will return to the office space once the coronavirus restrictions loosen up across the board?

With millions of employees now working from home due to COVID-19, asymmetric broadband offerings are a chokepoint for some business applications. Shrihari Pandit, the CEO of Stealth Communications, said that in addition to slower upstream speeds on DSL or cable broadband services, work from home (WFH) efforts have also been hampered by multiple users in a household using a single broadband connection for gaming, video streaming, video conferencing and remote learning.  "What we've seen is some difficulty in terms of making that successful.

In the first quarter, Charter added a total of 580,000 residential and small- and medium-sized business (SMB) internet customers. As of March 31, Charter CEO Tom Rutledge said Charter added approximately 120,000 customers, which also included video, voice and mobile services, through the Keeping America Connected program, "with many more installed in April." Charter's total internet subscribers increased by 6% to 25.5 million while net additions of internet customers was up by 42% in the quarter.

Altice USA notched its best-ever quarter for broadband subscribers additions in the first quarter. Altice added 50,000 broadband subscribers in the quarter as well as an additional 9,000 subscribers for its Altice Advantage tier, which is its low-income family broadband program. Driven in part by voluntary speed and rate increases, Altice's total broadband revenues in the first quarter increased by 14.2%. Altice's fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) deployments in the Optimum footprint slowed down due to permitting issues.

While network usage is still above pre-COVID-19 levels, the increases are starting to calm down a bit, according to Comcast and Verizon. Comcast said it was starting to see network traffic plateau in most places, including early work from home markets such as Seattle and California. For Comcast, which has the biggest residential internet network in the US, there has been a 33% increase in upstream traffic since March 1 while downstream traffic is up by 13%. As more people work from home, they're connecting to their work VPNs.