Competition/Antitrust

T-Mobile plans to make its Ultra Capacity 5G service available to 100 million more Americans in 2022, and as the company’s President of Technology Neville Ray told investors, it will have to expand its geographic coverage five-fold to achieve that goal, reaching many rural areas. Ultra Capacity 5G is the name that T-Mobile uses for 5G deployed in mid-band spectrum, which is widely viewed as supporting the optimum mixture of range and speed.

Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan is defending rules allowing so-called zombie votes, by which votes from FTC commissioners who leave the agency can count towards the commission’s current proceedings, even after said commissioners depart. The practice came to light recently after reporting by Politico revealed that as many as 20 votes from former Democratic Commissioner Rohit Chopra remained active, even after he left to become head of Biden’s Consumer Financial Protection Bu

The slowdown in cable broadband subscriber additions may be even slower than anticipated after executives at two of the top three publicly traded cable companies -- Comcast and Altice USA -- hinted that customer growth is trending at an even more decelerated pace than expected. Comcast Cable CEO Dave Watson said he expected to end 2021 with 1.3 million additional broadband subscribers.

With a much lighter debt load following a pair of asset sales totaling $1.8 billion in 2021, US broadband provider WideOpenWest (WOW!) set its sights on building greenfield fiber to as many as 400,000 homes by 2027. CFO John Rego said the company will start with an initial goal of building fiber-to-the-home to 200,000 locations by 2025 at an approximate cost of $160 million. If it finds success in its starter markets, he said, WOW!

Verizon announced the company has exceeded its year-end target of 14,000 new 5G Ultra Wideband cells sites, providing phone service to parts of 87 US cities, 5G Home to parts of 65 cities and 5G Business Internet to parts of 62 cities, including Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles and, launching December 9, Athens (GA), Knoxville (TN) and Tacoma (WA).

Boost Mobile said it’s going after the big three carriers head-on with a new annual unlimited plan that costs $25 per month. It’s the latest in what the Dish-owned prepaid brand is calling “Carrier Crusher” plans. The first launched in November 2021 offering wireless service with talk text and 1GB of data for an annual price of $100. That targeted customers who use less than 10GB of data per month, while the new focus is on unlimited. Both new and existing customers can get the latest no-frills unlimited plan that includes talk, text and data.

After years of broadband subscriber losses, larger telecom companies are poised to see subscriber gains in the 2023 to 2024 time frame, according to researchers at investment bank Cowen. This will occur as the telecom companies complete “record-setting” fiber broadband deployments. But the cable companies’ broadband market share will decline only slightly, from 60 percent today to 58 percent in 2027, the researchers argue. Meanwhile, the size of the broadband market will increase.

Comcast has touted all the network upgrades it is doing as it pushes toward DOCSIS 4.0, but it appears to be planning one more key move: rolling out new Wi-Fi routers that can handle the speeds it’s aiming to deliver. Comcast Cable CEO David Watson said the company views Wi-Fi as a key element of its broadband package.

Newspapers all over the country have been quietly filing antitrust lawsuits against Google and Facebook for the past year, alleging the two firms monopolized the digital ad market for revenue that would otherwise go to local news. What started as a small-town effort to take a stand against Big Tech has turned into a national movement, with over 200 newspapers involved across dozens of states.

Overseas telecom providers, increasingly frustrated with American tech firms whose apps are gobbling up bandwidth, are pushing them to pay more for it. Any effort to reslice the "cost of internet bandwidth" pie could shake up the entire industry, make new winners and losers, and put new pressure on US tech giants.