The most recently announced merger is between GFiber and Astound. It’s an interesting merger that brings together a premium fiber overbuilder and a traditional cable company that also owns some fiber assets.

GFiber has been somewhat of a mystery in the industry since its splashy launch in 2021. Known then as Google Fiber, the company was the first to introduce the whole country to the idea of gigabit fiber. There had been a few municipalities, cooperatives, and small telcos that offered gigabit broadband before 2012, but Google Fiber made big national news when it said it was going to overbuild the Kansas City metropolitan area and offer symmetrical gigabit fiber as its only broadband product. Google Fiber believed in simplicity, and originally only offered broadband before eventually layering on Google Voice and YouTube video. The company has always guarded any discussion of customer counts, but we are learning through news of the merger that GFiber has over 2.6 million passings, which means it probably has more than 1 million fiber customers.

Astound Broadband is a conglomerate of three broadband businesses.

• The original Astound started as a cable company in the San Francisco Bay area. The company purchased additional cable properties in Washington and Oregon and rebranded as Wave Broadband.
• RCN was founded in 1993 and had the unique business plan of overbuilding existing cable companies using cable company technology. The company was concentrated in the northeast, with the most customers in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Allentown, and Washington DC.
• Grande Communications was founded in San Marcos, Texas, in 1999. The company started by providing cable TV to campuses at Texas State University, the University of the Incarnate Word, Baylor University, and the University of Texas at Austin. The company grew to have over 1.1 million passings.

The merger announcement says that Astound covers around 4.6 million passings and has around 1 million broadband customers. The combined company would have 2 million customers and 7.1 million passings. This would make the company the seventh-largest ISP after Comcast, Charter, AT&T, Verizon, Altice, and T-Mobile. The seventh ranking recognizes the merger of Frontier with Verizon, the sale of Lumen fiber customers to AT&T, and the upcoming merger of Cox and Charter.

The merger has GFiber spinning off from Google’s Alphabet. The majority owner of the combined company will be Stonepeak, with the GFiber parent retaining a significant minority stake. The merger is supposed to close in the fourth quarter of this year. The GFiber executive team will lead the combined company.

This is an interesting merger that brings together companies using different technologies. I would have to think that the goal will be to upgrade to coaxial networks to fiber, or possibly to DOCSIS 4.0 to bring symmetrical gigabit speeds.

After this merger is completed, the only remaining large merger target is Altice, with over 4 million customers. There are no other ISPs left in the market that have more than a million broadband customers.