Competition/Antitrust

Lumen is taking a different path forward than the other big telephone companies. The company announced a major upgrade to its long-haul fiber routes that cross the country. The company’s main fiber strategy is to beef up the intercity network with plans to add six million miles of fiber to existing fiber routes by 2026. The existing Lumen long-haul fiber network came to the company in two acquisitions. The original network came when CenturyLink bought US West, which had earlier merged with Qwest, a major builder of long-haul networks.

BT’s chief executive said the telecommunications group had turned its broadband network into an “unstoppable machine” that will ultimately “end in tears” for many of its fiber competitors. “There is only going to be one national network,” Philip Jansen said. “Why do you need to have multiple providers?” The former monopoly said that its networking division Openreach had laid fibre to 9.6 million premises, with 29 percent of people in those areas opting to move over to its fibre offering.

Nextlink Internet, which was one of the top 10 winners in the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) rural broadband funding auction, has purchased most of the assets of Bluestem Network, a fiber broadband provider based in Lancaster and Seward Counties in Nebraska. Nextlink said it plans on using Bluestem’s assets as “a base to continue growing our fiber internet presence across southeast Nebraska.” Nextlink is already deploying fiber in nearby Gage County.

Telephone companies (telcos) that have been deploying fiber broadband are having a moment in the sun, finally reversing years of broadband subscriber losses to the cable companies. But will this last? What has given telcos an edge is fiber broadband’s ability to support gigabit and even multi-gigabit speeds bi-directionally. With traditional technology, cable companies can offer gigabit and multi-gigabit speeds but only in the downstream direction.

After broad outreach, and input that included more than 150 comments from a diverse array of stakeholders, NTIA identified two key policy issues hindering a more competitive app ecosystem: 1) Consumers largely can’t get apps outside of the app store model, controlled by Apple and Google. This means innovators have very limited avenues for reaching consumers. 2) Apple and Google create hurdles for developers to compete for consumers by imposing technical limits, such as restricting how apps can function or requiring developers to go through slow and opaque review processes.

The United States and our allies are in a high-stakes technology competition with authoritarian adversaries. How this competition plays out will profoundly shape our economic security – our ability to innovate, grow exports, create jobs of the future, and provide opportunities to all our people. It will also shape our national security – our ability to protect our advantages while preserving our freedoms and democratic values at home and abroad.

Charter Communications is upgrading its widespread hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) networks to support faster speeds. But the demand for lofty upstream speeds is not being driven by actual customer usage, according to CFO Chris Winfrey. "The upstream demand today is much more of a marketing campaign as opposed to any real product demand," said Winfrey. Upstream usage soared during the early stages of the pandemic as people worked and schooled from home, but downstream usage still exceeds upstream usage by a wide margin.

Every few years, BroadbandNow dives into the cost of internet plans across 2,000 US-based internet service providers (ISP) and how they compare to the median incomes of households across all 50 states plus the District of Columbia. BroadbandNow is again checking who in America has broadband—defined as a connection with a minimum of 25Mbps for downloads and 3Mbps for uploads—and how many can get it for less than $50 per month. The answer is still: not everyone.

With all of the recent buzz about fiber players getting prepared for acquisitions and incumbents expected to gobble up billions in forthcoming government funding, it’s not a far stretch to wonder if the rollup will result in less broadband competition across the country. But according to two leading telecom analysts, this is very unlikely to be the case post-mergers.

Charter Communications reported financial and operating results for the three and twelve months that ended December 31, 2022. Fourth quarter residential Internet customers increased by 92,000, compared to an increase of 172,000 customers during the fourth quarter of 2021. Spectrum Internet delivers the fastest speeds in Charter's footprint. Charter offers Spectrum Internet products with speeds up to 1 Gbps across its entire footprint.