1. Monthly archive
  2. February 2017

February 2017

Comcast to Bow 1-Gig Broadband in Huntsville, AL

Comcast said it plans to launch a DOCSIS 3.1-based 1-Gig broadband service to residences and businesses in Huntsville (AL) later in 2017, paving the way for a big broadband showdown with AT&T and an expected municipal service offering. Comcast is already selling DOCSIS 3.1 services in Atlanta, Nashville, Chicago and Detroit, and has set plans to introduce D3.1-based offerings in several markets this year, including Denver, San Francisco, and Kansas City, among others. Comcast didn’t announce expected pricing of the 1-Gig service in Huntsville, but, in other markets, it’s been offering it for a base price of $139.95 per month alongside the testing of a promotional price of $70 per month when customers agree to a three-year service contract.

Who's leading cable's (quiet) charge into wireless?

It’s no secret that some of the nation’s biggest cable operators are positioning themselves to expand into the wireless market in the coming months. Comcast reportedly plunked down nearly $2 billion as a deposit to participate in the incentive auction that will wrap up in the coming weeks, and Charter Communications has applied for regulatory approval for 5G experiments. Both companies are keeping their cards close to the vest as they plot their strategies, however. Comcast CEO Brian Roberts abruptly cut off a question from analyst Craig Moffett on last month's earnings call, saying only that “We’ll clarify things” at some point in the future. Charter has not been much more vocal about its plans.

Don’t Look Now, but the Great Unbundling Has Spun Into Reverse

[Commentary] The internet promised to be the great unbundler. The evisceration of distribution costs would free consumers from paying for cable television channels they never watched, allowing them to bypass cable monopolies and pay only for the shows they wanted. But paradoxically, the same forces that allowed classified ads and news to be so easily separated also drastically increased the economic rationale for bundling across the board. Consumers merely have swapped one bundle for another (or often, several). There are more than 65 million subscribers to cheaper “over the top” packages provided by Netflix, HBO, Hulu, Sling TV and others (even excluding Amazon Prime Video).

One does not always think of all of these as “bundles” because these services do not consistently categorize their content using the commonplace TV channel taxonomy. However, their aggregation of shows looks more and more like a traditional cable bundle. We are in the age of the great rebundling, when firms use packages of services as a way to increase their scale advantage and thus deepen the moat around their businesses.

[Jeremy G. Philips is a general partner at Spark Capital and an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School.]

© 1994-2024 Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. All Rights Reserved.