Competition/Antitrust

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.

While six large internet service providers (ISPs) dominate the United States fixed broadband market, Ookla's Speedtest Intelligence reveals smaller providers are sometimes the fastest ISPs in a given state in the Midwest, South and West. This analysis examines US states in which smaller ISPs were the fastest fixed broadband providers during Q3 2021. Major findings include:

Despite Americans using significantly more data over fixed networks than mobile, a new Mobile Experts report quantifies how consumers put a premium on the value they ascribe to mobile service. "Fixed Mobile Convergence 2021," the report from Mobile Experts, puts figures to the idea of this so-called “mobility premium” and forecasts the trend of fixed mobile convergence. It found that the average US household consumes over 11 times more data over fixed networks versus mobile access.

Real estate is complicated. Broadband is complicated. Together, they’re very complicated. The Federal Communications Commission recently launched a new proceeding to refresh the record on broadband competition and access in the multifamily and commercial real estate sectors. It sought similar information in 2017 and 2019.