Stacey Higginbotham

As regulators attempt to sift through the possible public harms and benefits of Comcast’s $45.2 billion plan to buy Time Warner Cable, we thought it was worth showing that if the deal takes place it could lead to a significant jump in the number of broadband subscribers getting a data cap.

If we add Time Warner Cable’s 11.6 million broadband subscribers from the end of 2013 into the mix of customers with caps, the total percentage of US homes that have some type of cap or other limit on downloads rises to 78 percent up from 64 percent today.

[Commentary] Well this is disappointing. Google is telling a local Austin news station that it plans to open signups for Google’s fiber-to-the-home service this summer, putting off the launch of the service until “later this year.”

KXAN, an NBC affiliate, also looked at some of the permits that Google has filed to see where it might be planning to lay fiber first. Google must apply for right of way in areas where it wants to dig and string fiber. So far, the map included with the story shows the current permits filed for areas south of the Colorado River (which is confusingly called Lady Bird Johnson Lake).

Delays aren’t unusual for Google’s gigabit network deployment, but it is nice to have a new deadline. When Google said last April it was bringing fiber to Austin it had planned to connect the customers by mid-2014 and open up the signups sometime around the first of the year. It doesn’t seem like the date has slipped too far, and I was wondering what the holdup was.

[Commentary] Comcast will file an application with the Federal Communications Commission for a formal review of the proposed Time Warner Cable transaction.

And once that happens, the Federal Communications Commission will have an excellent opportunity to get some of the data it will need to decide if it should regulate interconnection agreements between last-mile ISPs such as Comcast and other companies selling bandwidth or content over IP.

The problem appears to be congestion between online video providers like Netflix and bandwidth providers like Comcast that causes packets to drop and the end user experience to degrade. Basically, are last-mile ISPs acting as rent-seeking opportunists because they can or is this a legitimate business fight over who pays for the interconnections between networks? To decide the FCC will need data on both the actual congestion at these interconnection points and on the pricing that ISPs are charging. And the sense in Washington, as articulated by Public Knowledge SVP Harold Feld, is that the Comcast acquisition of Time Warner Cable is the right venue to force access to this data and start this debate.

So even as Netflix and Level 3 confuse the issue, equating it with paying for better access, the FCC is going to stand its ground and look at peering as an interconnection issue. That is part of FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s beloved network compact that is governing how he’s thinking about moving from the analog to the IP age in communications. And the logical place to start this review will be as part of the Comcast-Time Warner merger review.

The gloves are coming off in the fight to prevent Internet service providers (ISPs) from charging content providers and middle mile transit companies a fee to deliver web content to the end consumer.

Level 3 Communications, a transit provider, along with Netflix, filed formal comments to the Federal Communications Commission, and both give examples of what they see as ISPs trying to collect tolls in the middle of the network. Level 3 has proposed that the FCC should require ISPs to interconnect on “commercially reasonable terms, without the payment of an access charge.” Level 3 wants the FCC to say that access charges, where an ISP charges those it exchanges traffic with for the privilege of reaching its users, are not commercially reasonable. It then suggests some basics on how the FCC should think about “commercially reasonable terms.”

Basically, Level 3 wants an ISP to add more capacity at congested areas at no charge or offer another point of interconnection in the geographic area where it will provide interconnection without charge. It’s unclear if Level 3′s definition of no charge, means that Level 3 won’t help offset the cost of the gear to provide more capacity. As a way of mitigating the burden such rules would lay on ISPs, Level 3 suggests that ISPs would only have to interconnect with large networks. It also notes that the FCC could implement this rule without imposing common carrier rules on ISPs, which the agency is clearly unwilling to do.

Comcast took the lion’s share of new broadband subscriber additions in 2013 proving that the largest provider has a clear advantage over its smaller counterparts.

According to the Leichtman Research Group, the seventeen largest cable and telephone providers in the US -- representing about 93 percent of the market -- acquired over 2.6 million net additional high-speed Internet subscribers in 2013. That’s slightly less than the net adds from 2012. Comcast added about 1.3 million broadband subscribers in 2013 – accounting for 49 percent of the total net additions for all providers in the year.

On the telco side, Verizon added the most new subscribers with 220,000 new subs, or a bit less than 10 percent of the total net adds. Most of the net adds — 82 percent — came from the cable companies, although it appears that thanks to new fiber-to-the-home and fiber-to-the-node deployments, telcos did get a greater percentage of the new additions in 2013 compared to 2012.