Competition/Antitrust

Baltimore has an audacious goal to build a city-owned broadband service that could give its poorest residents equal access to digital resources for education, medical services and jobs. The plan lands the port city an hour from the nation’s capital squarely in the middle of a national debate over who deserves a chunk of the $95 billion in federal funding Congress allocated to close the digital divide. It also pits local officials against Comcast, the cable giant that already serves the city. “Access is too important to leave to the market and private actors.

There are useful lessons from a saga over home internet service in Canada. What has been a promising, albeit imperfect, system that increased choices and improved internet service for Canadians is poised to fall apart.

Verizon currently cites a speed of 300 Mbps for its 5G fixed wireless offering. That speed could increase beginning as early as 2023 when the company gains access to additional spectrum that it won in the 2021 C-band auction, said Matt Ellis, Verizon executive vice president and chief financial officer. The company was the biggest winner in 2021’s C-band auction.

Fixed wireless access (FWA) broadband could add more than 10 million subscribers in the next five years, driven by programs geared toward rural markets, according to Wells Fargo telecom and media analysts Eric Luebchow and Steven Cahall. The analysts predict that total broadband subscriber additions will accelerate to 4.5-to-5 million annually in 2023 and 2024, fueled mainly by FWA and fiber overbuilds. Over the next five years, Luebchow and Cahall predict FWA will rise from 7.1 million total subscribers at the end of 2021 to 17.6 million in 2027.

MoffetNathanson's Craig Moffet asked Charter CEO Tom Rutledge if cable operators will inevitably have to spend big bucks on fiber deployments to stay competitive in the broadband business. Rutledge said, “We have a lot of fiber in our network, and it’s really a question of where do you end the fiber, and what technology do you use to maximize the connectivity with the end device?” He noted that even a fiber feed directly to a house doesn’t deliver fiber to a device. What delivers connectivity to a device is actually Wi-Fi in most cases.

Sens Mike Lee (R-UT), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) have introduced the Competition and Transparency in Digital Advertising Act. The bill would restore and protect competition in digital advertising by eliminating conflicts of interest that have allowed the leading platforms in the market to manipulate ad auctions and impose monopoly rents on a broad swath of the US economy.

It’s long been a saying in telecommunications that “all wireless networks end in a wire.” But Charter CEO Tom Rutledge recently emphasized that point. Both Charter and Comcast have been making good headway with their mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) businesses, seeing substantial subscribers adds in recent quarters. And the CEOs of both companies have consistently said that they see their MVNO businesses as a way to offer more choice for their broadband customers. But perhaps their mindset is starting to evolve a bit, where they’re seeing real profit possibilities in wireless.

Between inflation, rising interest rates and turmoil in the stock market, it’s no wonder fears are rising that another recession might be around the corner. But broadband providers don’t seem all that concerned about how such a turn might impact the sector.

Frontier Communications expects to surpass one million new fiber passings by the end of 2022 – hitting 100,000 to 200,000 additional locations – according to CFO Scott Beasley. The accelerated buildout is mainly due to Frontier’s recent move to boost its liquidity to a total of $4 billion, meaning the company has plenty of cash on hand until mid-2024. “First, it sends a strong signal to overbuilders to build somewhere else if they thought we weren’t going to build [fiber].

Public Knowledge released the paper “A Lesson From the Landmark AT&T Breakup: Both a Sector-specific Regulator and Antitrust Enforcers Were Needed” by Senior Fellow Al Kramer. This paper discusses how the work of regulators and antitrust enforcers, working independently and with separate mandates, nevertheless complemented each other, to lead to the breakup of the AT&T Bell phone monopoly in 1984—marking a win for consumers and telephone competitors alike.