Jeff Baumgartner

Comcast Business said it has introduced a wireless gateway tailored for commercial environments that enables its customers to assign one private signal for its own day-to-day needs and a separate, public signal for customers or visitors.

The new device is entering view as Comcast Business develops a new “amenity” Wi-Fi offering for small business customers that could, for example, provide access to a separate, company-branded SSID with usage rules, security components and other terms of service set by the business owner. The device being rolled out now delivers a second "Xfinity WiFi" SSID.

Comcast said the new Business Wireless Gateway, developed by Cisco Systems, is now included in most of its business Internet plans.

As the proposed marriages of Comcast and Time Warner and AT&T and DirecTV move forward, this latest wave of consolidation is poised to have an effect on the telecommunications supplier market, creating a fresh batch of winners and losers.

That, of course, will extend to the realm of video gateways and set-top boxes, with at least one analyst believing that this new round of mergers and acquisitions will cause a shift in a market that is largely made up of Pace, Arris (thanks to its acquisition of Motorola Home in 2013), Cisco Systems, Technicolor and EchoStar.

“This mature, yet fragmented market, in which the top five vendors account for about 37% of the revenues, is ripe for further consolidation,” Sam Rosen, practice director at ABI Research, predicted, pointing out that Arris, with its focus on cable and IPTV, stayed ahead of Pace, which, in his estimation, is “over-weighted on satellite.”

Although the cord-cutting trend remains small, consumers who have wielded the video shears are apparently happy with their decision.

About 84% of cord-cutters are “at least somewhat happy with their decision,” while 37% said they’re so happy that they have no plans to ever return to a traditional pay-TV service, nScreenMedia found in a new study that surveyed 1,000 US adults with broadband access. Of that same group, 8% said they were “pretty unhappy” with their cord-cutting decision, and 9% said they hated the decision and wished they had service again.

The report -- View My Video: Consumer Digital Media Consumption -- also found that 17% of US broadband subscribers surveyed say they once took a pay-TV service but have since left their provider, while 10% say they have never subscribed to pay-TV (the so-called “cord-nevers”), and 74% said they currently take a pay-TV service.

As Netflix prepares to invade six more countries in Europe, Bernstein Research analyst Carlos Kirjner attempted to size up the streaming giant’s global opportunities in a report.

The “opportunity is more limited than many realize,” the analyst wrote, noting that infrastructure and affordability issues will limit Netflix in markets such as Latin America. But the forecast still seems to present some pretty big numbers.

“Assuming generously that Netflix deploys aggressively in 17 new countries over the next 2-3 years, we believe that by 2023 the number of broadband households in these markets with fixed connections capable of supporting SVOD will reach 243 [million],” Kirjner suggested. He also sees Netflix reaching about 65 million international subs, or roughly a 50% share of the research firm’s estimated international SVOD market, but only “if it deploys service very aggressively across all 17 incremental countries in our assumptions.”

That’s a sizable jump from where Netflix is today internationally, with 10.9 million subs. While 14% of that total comes from the UK and Ireland, and 25% from Canada, Netflix, to Kirjner’s earlier point, has only been able to scratch together about 1.5 million customers in Latin America (1% of total households), despite having launched there more than two and a half years ago.

Clarifying comments made at the MoffettNathanson Media & Communications Summit in New York that some misinterpreted as a firm commitment that Comcast would implement usage-based policies across the board in five years, Comcast executive VP and chief diversity officer David Cohen said that’s not the case.

“To be clear, we have no plans to announce a new data usage policy,” Cohen wrote, pointing out that Comcast suspended its previous 250-Gigabyte-per-month excessive use policy in 2012. “Since then, we’ve had no data caps for any of our customers anywhere in the country.”

Comcast, however, is testing usage-based policies that link soft monthly caps with overage fees in a handful of markets, including Atlanta. In those tests, customers are fitted with a monthly limit of 300 GB per month before they are faced with a $10 charge for each additional bucket of 50 GB. Comcast is also testing a “Flexible-Data Option” that’s tailored to light Internet users.

TiVo has not yet expressed a position on the proposed Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger, but the company gave Comcast high marks for its support for the CableCARD.

Among operators, “Comcast has been particularly cooperative in making CableCARD work for TiVo,” TiVo noted in an ex parte describing a meeting on May 8 between Tom Rogers, TiVo’s CEO and president, and Matthew Zinn, TiVo’s SVP, general counsel secretary and chief privacy officer, and Federal Communications Commission chairman Tom Wheeler, Chairman Wheeler’s special counsel for external affairs Gigi Sohn, and Maria Kirby, the chairman’s legal advisor.

The purpose of the meeting was to urge the Commission to grant TiVo’s July 2013 petition that seeks to reinstate the CableCARD rules that, TiVo claims, were “inadvertently vacated” by a DC court decision in which EchoStar won its challenge to FCC rules on the ability to record TV programming. During that same meeting, Rogers “noted that TiVo has not yet stated a position on the proposed Comcast-Time Warner merger,” according to the ex parte.

The nation’s top nine incumbent cable operators have deployed more than 47 million operator-supplied set-tops with CableCARDs, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association told the Federal Communications Commission in a report filed on May 9.

That’s up from about 45 million when the NCTA filed its FCC report in late January. The number of CableCARDs deployed in leased devices continues to dwarf the number of modules used in devices with CableCARD slots sold at retail, including TiVo DVRs and a limited number of HDTV models.

In its latest report, the NCTA said the nine largest US MSOs have deployed over 616,000 CableCARDs for use in retail devices, just 10,000 more than the 606,000 reported in January.

The proposed bill or CableCARD provision in the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act (STELA) action would clear cable operators to deploy devices with integrated security, though the cable industry has pledged to continue supporting retail CableCARD devices.

Using a mix of quasi-public hotspots deployed in outdoor locations, businesses and on customer-side DOCSIS gateways, Comcast said its Wi-Fi network will span 8 million hotspots by the end of 2014.

Comcast, which announced it had surpassed the 1 million mark in early April, said it will be boosting that number throughout the year by deploying hotspots in several markets, including Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Hartford, Houston, Indianapolis, Miami, Minneapolis, Nashville, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Portland, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington DC.

Usage is also on the rise. Comcast said nearly 200 million out-of-home sessions have been initiated on its Wi-Fi network so far in 2014, a 700% increase versus the same period in 2013.

In a wide-ranging discussion at The Cable Show, a handful of the cable’s top tech and engineering executives said technologies such as DOCSIS 3.1 position them well to offer Gigabit-level broadband services as they increasingly find themselves matched up with competitors such as Google Fiber and AT&T and the potential expansion of the telecommunication’s fiber-based “U-verse with GigaPower” platform.

Time Warner Cable, which is pairing off with Google Fiber in Kansas City, is wary of that competition, but has found that the new entrant has had limited success and that some customers are coming back because they like TWC’s video service better.

Google Fiber “is certainly a worthy competitor, if they’re going to overbuild us,” but that they offer “nothing dramatically different” than what TWC can bring to bear, Mike LaJoie, TWC’s executive vice president and chief technology and network operations officer, said. “Their product works. Our product works just as well.”

Cable’s incremental economics are generally better than someone who is entering the market in a greenfield situation and looking to cherry pick, Tony Werner, Comcast’s EVP and CTO, said, noting that Comcast has raised its speeds 13 times in the last 12 years and has begun to make 100 Mbps (downstream) its main flagship product in the Northeast and will look to continue that trend.

If cable operators are eager to keep the budding cord-cutting trend in check, they’d be well served to offer an integrated, aggregated one-stop-shop that combines traditional TV services with fare delivered over-the-top, according to a new study from Amdocs.

About 76% of purported cord-cutters or consumers who had reduced the size of their video subscription -- sometimes referred to as “cord-shaving” -- said they would reconsider if they were offered a service that aggregates all video content, according to a survey of 750 consumers in North America commissioned by the customer care and billing specialist. Roughly 66% of all respondents said they would prefer this TV/OTT mix, while 40% said they would pay more for that kind of combination, Amdocs found.

Although cable operators have fared poorly in recent consumer studies, Amdocs said its survey found that multiple service operators (MSOs) outperformed OTT players in terms of customer service (92%), content (89%), and video quality (83%).