Competition/Antitrust

Americans are paying almost as much for connected living room services as they are for electricity, natural gas and water, according to TiVo's Q4 Video Trends Report. TiVo's latest survey said that US consumers who still take traditional bundled video are spending, on average, $124.40 a month for pay TV and broadband, up 11 percent in the six months from when TiVo conducted its Q2 report in 2021. Add to that a bill Netflix and other subscription streaming services, and pay TV consumers are forking out an average of $203.60 a month for internet and video entertainment.

New research from Parks Associates found the number of broadband cord cutters in the US has risen over the past year, with operators missing out on billions in revenue as a result. The firm’s latest figures show there are now 13.9 million home internet cord cutters in the country, up from just over 12 million in March 2021.

What is the perfect home-internet plan? A new survey from HighSpeedInternet.com figured it out based on the opinions of 1,002 US adults who have made at least one internet-plan switch in the past three years. Most customers covet a fiber-to-the-home connection running a minimum of 650 megabits per second, costing about $50 a month, preferable a little less. Why is that the sweet spot? Because the plans most people have now are far too expensive. The pandemic, of course, played a part.

It’s sometimes easy to forget that the broadband business is just over twenty-five years old. Cable companies have adopted another interesting way to compete through what is called hidden fees, which are fees that are not clearly identified when new customers sign for service. Hidden fees have been around a long time, but in recent years have become gigantic. The motivation for having hidden fees is clear – it lets a cable company advertise a low price for basic service by not mentioning the hidden fees.

In this Report and Order, the Federal Communications Commission adopted rules to promote competitive choice of communications services for those living and working in multiple tenant environments (MTEs), and to address practices that undermine longstanding rules promoting competition in

The bipartisan infrastructure bill appears to transform how the federal government subsidizes broadband infrastructure. But evidence suggests that big companies may not allow the status quo to change without a fight. In a break from the past, the majority of new broadband infrastructure money won’t be distributed by the Federal Communications Commission, which tended to award grants to the biggest companies.

The last two years or so have seen a slew of broadband providers rename either themselves or their services. Some are even using a brand name as though it was a company, issuing press releases that scarcely reference the official corporate identity, instead using only the brand name as the protagonist. In the latter category is Windstream, which routinely issues press releases under the Kinetic name.

Deutsche Telekom is making good on its promise to become majority owner of T-Mobile US, paying $2.4 billion to SoftBank Group to increase its stake to 48.4 percent in the US company. Deutsche Telekom (DT), based in Bonn, Germany, bought 21.2 million T-Mobile shares at an average price of $113 per share. The move raised its stake in T-Mobile by 5.3 percent.

One-third of T-Mobile fixed wireless access (FWA) subscribers are in rural areas, according to an estimate from telecom financial analysts at MoffettNathanson. It’s a surprising finding, considering that the analysts estimate that only 6 percent of locations that can get T-Mobile fixed wireless are in rural areas. Forty-four percent of T-Mobile fixed wireless subscribers are in urban census blocks, which represent 74 percent of locations that can get T-Mobile fixed wireless, according to the estimates.

I was asked an interesting question recently: will fiber help the big telecom companies turn the corner to success? It’s a good question when looking at telcos like Frontier, Windstream, Lumen, and any others who are late to the game for converting copper to fiber. There are a lot of factors that will come into play, so the answer is likely to be different by company. On the plus side is a general consensus by many households that fiber is the best technology. There is a sizable percentage of homes in any market that will move to fiber given a chance.