The following are a few interesting stories that don’t warrant a standalone blog, but that I found interesting.
Amazon One Delays. Amazon asked the FCC for a two-year delay in meeting its commitment to launch half of its promised constellation of 3,236 satellites. The deadline for having more than 1,600 satellites in orbit was July 30 of this year. As of the date of writing this blog, the company only has 212 satellites in orbit. Amazon says it has contracted for ten additional 10 SpaceX launches to speed up its process.
This is bad news for homes where Amazon One was the BEAD winner, like a number of counties where I live in Western North Carolina. If Amazon follows the historical path of Starlink, it will need at least 1,600 satellites in orbit to provide reasonable service, and more is better. With no additional delays, the service likely won’t be available until at least late summer 2028.
In related news, the FCC granted Amazon One the ability to add 4,500 satellites to its broadband constellation. This increase would result in the following: 3,232 Generation 1 satellites, 3,212 second-generation satellites, and 1,292 satellites in a polar orbit.
NTIA Opposes Relaxation of BEAD Compliance Requirements. Starlink sent a request to numerous states asking for relaxed BEAD implementation rules, which included a request that Starlink would not have to conduct speed tests for BEAD-funded customers. NTIA quickly added a new item to its Frequently Asked Questions that states that, “no BEAD statutory requirements or other program rules may be altered by a BEAD subgrant agreement”.
Charter Grows Cable Subscribers. Charter surprisingly grew cable customers in the fourth quarter of 2025 after losing customers every quarter for years. I laughed when I read that, because I know how they did this since I am one of their new cable subscribers. We called and asked about upgrading to gigabit broadband and were offered a lower price than what we pay today for 500 Mbps, but only if we agreed to take cable TV. I am now a phantom Charter cable customer who will never watch any of the content. Like many millions of households, I am no longer interested in linear TV that forces me to surf through channels I don’t want to watch.
This is not the first time this has happened to me. Twelve years ago, I was forced to take cable TV from Comcast in order to get broadband. The settop box went into the closet the first day and was never plugged in. I have to assume both Comcast and Charter paid programmers on my behalf, which is an odd and expensive financial choice.
Rural Backhaul. WISPA, the trade association for wireless ISPs, complained to the FCC that Charter is refusing to renew contracts to provide backhaul to many of its WISP members. WISPs are reliant on having at least some of the towers in a network connected by fiber, and if companies like Charter stop selling backhaul, some WISP networks will be degraded or could even go dark.
Buying rural backhaul has always been a challenge in many parts of the country due to the small number of companies with fiber that are willing to sell bandwidth to other ISPs. Many rural ISPs are forced to pay far more per gigabyte to buy rural backhaul from telcos and cable companies. It’s hard to speculate why Charter would do this. The company might want to focus its sales and marketing efforts elsewhere. But it could also be for a more sinister reason if Charter is doing this to eliminate or cripple rural competition.
Comcast Class-Action Settlement. Comcast settled a class-action lawsuit and agreed to pay $117.5 million as a result of a data breach that released sensitive customer data. That may sound like a lot, but the settlement covers 31.7 million customers and works out to a settlement of $3.70 per customer before subtracting out the amount that will go to lawyers. This settlement doesn’t place much value on customer privacy and data.