Ownership

A new lawsuit filed against Comcast details an extensive list of lies the cable company allegedly told customers in order to hide the full cost of service. Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson sued Comcast in Hennepin County District Court on Dec 21, seeking refunds for all customers who were harmed by Comcast's alleged violations of the state's Prevention of Consumer Fraud Act and Uniform Deceptive Trade Practices Act.

Here are 10 questions about broadband we hope to find answers to in 2019:

The Federal Communications Commission has before it applications in the attached appendices that: (1) seek consent to the assignment of certain television broadcast licenses held by subsidiaries of Raycom Media, Inc. (Raycom) to a subsidiary of Gray Television, Inc.

Today, Americans can choose between four nationwide wireless carriers – but that choice is now threatened by the proposed merger of Sprint and T-Mobile. If allowed to proceed as proposed, this merger will condense the market to just three national carriers, leading to higher prices, foreclosing the entrance of new competitors and eliminating jobs. And while the companies have promised that this deal would speed the roll out of 5G and improve rural service, the facts belie these claims. This deal offers no meaningful public benefit and threatens vast consumer harms.

Sprint and T-Mobile are urging Comcast to say publicly how it believes it will be affected by the proposed merger of the nation’s third and fourth largest wireless network operators.

This was the year when Big Tech companies were humbled, their reputations tarnished, and their share prices clobbered by a tidal wave of political outrage over misinformation, censorship, and data abuse. This public flogging may go too far.

Facebook's business model has always been simple: acquire as much personal information from users as possible, then find a way to make money off of it. For more than a decade, it proved to be a remarkably successful strategy, bringing to the social platform 2 billion monthly users to friend, feud and play Farmville. But as the year comes to a close, Facebook is facing a pair of major lawsuits in the US and reeling from a string of public relations disasters.

Telecom operators need to get their artificial intelligence (AI), SDN and cloud ducks in a row or risk becoming a "dumb pipe" for connectivity, according to a report by GlobalData. “Telecom operators are increasingly seeking to move beyond the dumb pipe of simple connectivity and diversify in the cloud, AI and SDN," said Laura Petrone, senior analyst for GlobalData. "This trajectory will bring them into direct competition with technology interlopers that are also actively targeting segments that telecoms operators might once have seen as their own.”

As 2018 comes to a close, Sprint said it has much to show for the roughly $5 billion it spent upgrading its network throughout the course of this year. “We are celebrating a banner year for the Sprint network,” wrote CTO John Saw. “We made a massive investment to drive strong improvements in our network performance today and prepare to launch mobile 5G starting in the first half of next year.

AT&T plans to launch its own streaming service in 2019, drawing on content from DC Comics and Harry Potter that was acquired as part of the recent Time Warner deal. But telecommunication companies have a unique advantage: they control the content and the networks that content travels over, presenting a wonderful opportunity to hamstring competitors and unfairly advantage their own services. Heavy-handed tactics like throttling and usage caps would have been blocked by the 2015 network neutrality rules.