Fierce

Charter Communications is making the latest move on the telecommunications mergers and acquisitions front, announcing it will acquire Liberty Broadband. But it won’t be getting Alaskan operator GCI as part of the deal. Liberty Broadband, which owns shares in a broad range of communications businesses, acquired GCI in 2020. It also has a 26 percent ownership of Charter, or around 45.6 million shares of Charter’s common stock.

The Universal Service Fund (USF) has been stuck in legislative limbo as the government wrestles with how to improve the subsidy program. Experts think USF reform could see momentum in Trump’s second term, but how that will pan out is a trickier question to answer. The USF, which supports broadband access and affordability in rural and low-income communities, is made up of four [sic] smaller programs: Connect America Fund, Lifeline, E-Rate and Rural Health Care. One glaring problem with the current USF framework is the shrinking contribution base.

Cox Communications owns two companies that provide fiber broadband for enterprises—Unite Private Networks (UPN) and Segra. And Cox just cleaned up the portfolio of these companies by selling the Pacific Northwest assets of UPN to Ziply Fiber. Both UPN and Segra provide fiber optic communications services to commercial enterprises as well as organizations such as schools, governments, service providers and hyperscalers. Ziply will acquire UPN’s fiber assets, network and customers in Washington, Idaho, Wyoming and Montana.

With USCellular's agreement to sell AT&T $1.018 billion of spectrum, all three of the major mobile operators "have taken a chunk" of the rural carrier's assets. The agreement includes the sale of 1,250M MHz-Pops of 3.45 GHz and 331M MHz-Pops of 700 MHz B/C block licenses to AT&T. This spectrum will likely enable AT&T to layer in better coverage on its existing 5G footprint. The sale, once approved by regulators, will add additional spectrum to AT&T's existing bandwidth to improve overall coverage. The 700 MHz band is valuable for distance coverage.