Telecommunication

British communications regulator Ofcom said it had started the process to scrap legislation compelling BT, the former state-owned monopoly, to provide dedicated landlines for the devices at affordable prices.

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York upheld the chapter 11 restructuring of Windstream Holdings Inc., finding bondholder complaints about the debt-cutting plan moot because reversing it would mean unwinding transactions that have already taken place. The court backed Windstream's 2020 restructuring, which put Elliott Management Corp. and other senior creditors in control of the business while wiping out junior bondholders owed roughly $2.4 billion. 

Verizon experienced a total revenue of $34.2 billion, an increase of 4.0 percent from the third quarter of 2021. Total broadband net additions of 377,000, including 342,000 fixed wireless net additions, reflecting strong demand for reliable and high-value broadband offerings. Total broadband net additions increased by 109,000 from the second quarter of 2022, and fixed wireless net additions increased by 86,000 from the second quarter of 2022.

AT&T's core wireless business overshot its expectations during the third quarter of 2022, driving higher revenue and profits despite lingering worries about inflation. The company added 708,000 postpaid phone connections, a metric that investors use to measure the strength of a cellphone carrier’s main profit center. For the third consecutive quarter, the tally handily topped projections of Wall Street analysts, who had been expecting 552,300 connections in the third quarter.

Total worldwide telecoms revenues from mobile and fixed broadband services will grow 14% between 2022 and 2027 to reach €1.2 trillion ($1.18 trillion). However monthly average revenue per user (ARPU) combined across both mobile and fixed broadband will fall by 4.2% from €7.48 ($7.36) in 2022 to €7.16 ($7.05) in 2027. In mobile markets, it is now evident that 5G will not be sufficient to offset ARPU decline as customers are unwilling to pay more for it.

Many telecommunications companies are reviving the idea of having content companies pay for last-mile network connections because of the profit it would generate. South Korea serves as a useful predictor of how the bad consequences of this idea play out in real-time. Back in 2016, South Korea adopted a new interconnection rule based on a long-standing telco compensation rule called “sending party network pays” (SPNP).

DigitalBridge is an investment company, whose US assets include about 368,000 miles of fiber, about 250,000 macro cell sites and about 48,000 small cells. Globally, it owns nearly 450 data centers. It owns 29 companies around the world with a total of about 29,000 employees. CEO Marc Ganzi recently commented on the telecommunications labor shortage. “Our biggest problem, I can't get people back to work,” Ganzi said. “I can't get people to micro-trench ditches. I can't get people to climb poles. I can't get people to build cell towers fast enough. We have a massive labor shortage issue.

For rural operators looking to take advantage of edge computing, partnerships will be key to their success. Taking a “build it and they will come” approach may not be the right strategy. Instead, the opportunity could be in partnering with “hyperscalers” (massive companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon) that are looking to deploy edge computing equipment in rural America but don’t have the local resources/ capabilities to do so. Key information from this report includes: 

The United States is committed to making further progress on ensuring all our citizens are connected and improving both the level and the quality of telecommunications. We are working to ensure that every American has access to affordable high-speed internet, to invest in resilient infrastructure and more secure networks, and to use technology that aligns with our values.

After more than a year of waiting, Brightspeed finally closed on a $7.5 billion deal to acquire Lumen Technologies’ telecommunications assets in 20 states via its parent company Apollo Global Management.