Fierce

A New York District Court judge issued a temporary restraining order preventing Cable One from completing its acquisition of a 55 percent stake in Mega Broadband Investments, after lender CoBank sued to stop the deal. CoBank, one of Cable One’s existing lenders, filed suit against Cable One, arguing the operator is “currently insolvent” and grossly overpaying for assets it knows are worth substantially less. According to court documents, the deal was set to close the day the restraining order was issued.

The common theme that spanned across SCTE TechExpo26 in Atlanta was that the cable industry is facing a new network challenge as upstream broadband traffic grows faster than many operators anticipated. OpenVault CEO and Founder Mark Trudeau said the industry's focus has shifted from simply adding downstream capacity to ensuring networks can reliably support a growing volume of upstream activity driven by applications such as AI, content creation, and social media uploads.

British Telecom is buying TalkTalk Telecommunications and its subsidiary PlatformX Communications for about $540 million. BT said it’s buying the companies to “keep them out of administration,” which is a U.K. process similar to bankruptcy in the U.S. BT said that by buying the companies it is protecting services for 1.5 million TalkTalk residential broadband customers along with 1 million wholesale customers. TalkTalk and PlatformX were taken private by Toscafund in 2021 and subsequently backed by major creditor Ares Management. TalkTalk is not an infrastructure-based broadband provider.

The AI race is already well underway at the largest network operators. But for smaller broadband providers, the questions are often more basic: Do we have the resources for this? Where is it on our list of priorities? Where do we even start? Lou Borelli is CEO of the National Content & Technology Cooperative (NCTC), a cooperative comprised of cable operators, ILECs, CLECs, and other independent broadband and pay-TV service providers.

The times they are a-changin' when it comes to landline telephone service.

A recent Innovative Systems survey of 132 rural operators found 82% have no clear or defined AI strategy and 49% have only limited or informal adoption of the technology.

Lumen Technologies has launched Lumen Intelligent Internet, which lets its enterprise customers buy connectivity in minutes and scale bandwidth up or down as their AI, cloud, and business needs demand.