Tag Archives: Altice

A Peek Into the Latest Merger

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.

Broadband Shorts December 2025

Library Grants Reinstated

In November, the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island ruled that the Administration had to distribute all of the grants to libraries that had been authorized by Congress. The Administration had decided not to distribute all of the grant funding normally handled by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, an agency created by Congress in 1996 to consolidate grants for libraries. This court order has possible relevance to broadband since NTIA has refused to distribute grants from the Digital Equity Fund and is hinting at not distributing BEAD non-deployment funds.

Altice Sues Its Creditors

In a curious lawsuit, Altice, which recently rebranded as Optimum, has sued Apollo Capital Management, BlackRock, and six other financial firms and accused them of colluding to block the company from refinancing its debt. The group of companies each holds a share of Altice debt. The lawsuit says that the group signed an agreement in July 2024 that requires two-thirds of the creditors to approve any new financing deals with Altice.

Consumers Hanging on to Smartphones

A survey conducted by Reviews.org found that people are hanging onto phones an average of 29 months, and that the number is increasing. This is obviously a major concern for handset manufacturers and cellular carriers, which use the replacement and upgrade of  smartphones as an opportunity to lock customers into a new contract. I don’t know about readers of the blog, but I’m not seeing any major upgrades that are enough incentive to upgrade sooner.

Chinese LEO Satellites

On December 6, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. announced the fourteenth launch of LEO satellites that will be used for broadband. Guowang (the National Network) has plans to launch a constellation of 13,000 satellites for broadband to compete with Starlink and Amazon One. There is a second effort constellation underway called Quinfan (Thousand Sails), being funded by the city of Shanghai, that has plans for a constellation of 15,000 satellites. These efforts are significant because they can create a lot of competition for Starlink and Amazon LEO around the globe.

Acceptance of 5G

According to a survey conducted by YouGov, 62% of Americans now say that 5G has improved their digital experience. Approval is higher (67%) for those between the ages of 18 and 30. The highest approval of 5G, at 69%, comes from households that earn twice or more of the median household income.

Congress Takes up Wi-Fi

 Congressmen Troy A. Carter, Sr. (D-LA) and Bob Latta (R-OH), along with Senators Pete Ricketts (R-NE) and Jacky Rosen (D-NV), announced they will co-chair the relaunch of the bipartisan, bicameral Wi-Fi Caucus. Initially founded in 2018, the Wi-Fi Caucus is dedicated to assisting Members of Congress in better understanding how Wi-Fi benefits the American public, consumers, economy, and the larger geopolitical standing of the United States. This is an interesting effort when considering that Congress passed legislation that required the FCC to fine 800 megahertz of mid-range spectrum for auction, some of which likely will come from the 6 GHz Wi-Fi band.

Altice in the News

We haven’t heard a lot of bad news about ISPs lately since most are doing well financially. One of the most troubled ISPs in the news for the last several years has been Altice. There were rumors in the financial press recently that the company has been working with creditors to restructure its $25 billion in debt to avoid bankruptcy.

Altice USA is led by Patrick Drahi, who also owns Altice France. The America company spun off into a separate corporation in 2018. The American company was formed in 2016 from the acquisition and merger of Suddenlink Communications and Cablevision. The combined companies had about 4.6 million broadband customers at the time, making them the fourth largest cable company after Comcast, Charter, and Cox.

It’s been clear for years that anybody who watches the ISP market that Altice USA has been struggling. In 2016 the company announced it was going to convert all of its cable DOCSIS networks to fiber, making it the first cable company to fully pursue that upgrade. However, the fiber upgrades quickly slowed down. In 2024, Altice added 210,000 fiber passings to bring reach 3 million fiber passings out of its total of 9.8 million passings. During this slow transition, the companies older DOCSIS 3.0 networks have been falling behind expected performance and the company has been losing broadband subscribers. Since the end of 2022, the company shed about 6% of its broadband customers, with only Lumen doing worse among the largest ISPs.

The company also has struggled with customer service and has fallen to near the bottom in the national rankings of public satisfaction with ISPs. Earlier this year, the company reached a $119.5 million settlement with West Virginia related to complaints about the company’s quality of service. That settlement included roughly $3 million in fines, $4 million in customer refunds, and the rest pledged for broadband improvements. If the improvements aren’t in place by the end of 2027 there will be an additional $40 million fine.

But the big albatross for the company has been the giant bond payments coming due. I’ve been reading Wall Street analysts for several years who have predicted the eventual bankruptcy of the company. It was clear in looking at the annual reports a few years ago that the company would have a huge problem in restructuring billions in debt in an environment where any new loans have a higher interest rate than the old ones.

There was a rumor a year ago that Charter was thinking about buying or merging with Altice, but that never materialized.

Altice France is also in the news. The company recently reached an agreement with lenders to convert outstanding debt into equity. Various lenders held more than $25 billion in Altice debt. The two primary lenders took 45% equity in the company. For that equity, the lenders will forgive $9 billion in debt and extend the remaining debt maturities into the future. The new creditor/owners will get two seats on the Board. This doesn’t necessarily leave Altice in a strong position since it will still be saddled with $16 billion in future debt. For those not aware of the structure of many corporate bonds, the typical terms include a big balloon payment at the end. During the life of the bond, the borrower pays interest only with no principal payments.

The Public Loves Fiber

The latest Customer Satisfaction Index is out from ACSI, which measures the public satisfaction of a wide range of U.S. industries and institutions. The survey this year continued to show that the public has a poor opinion of ISPs. As a group, ISPs had an average ACSI annual rating of 68. The only industry with a lower rating is gas stations at 65. Subscription TV had an average rating of 69, and the U.S. Post Office had a rating of 70.

But there is some interesting good news for some ISPs. Companies serving customers with fiber rated higher with the public than other ISPs, including cable companies using coaxial networks. Consider the following table that shows the 2023 ranking for fiber and non-fiber ISPs.

Fiber Non-Fiber
Altice 58
AT&T 80 72
Cable One 71
CenturyLink 78 62
Charter 64
Comcast 73 68
Cox 64
Frontier 74 61
Google Fiber 76
Mediacom 65
T-Mobile 73
Verizon 75
Windstream 70

For companies that offer both fiber and another technology, customers served by fiber liked an ISP more than non-fiber customers. CenturyLink has the biggest difference in satisfaction (78 for fiber and 62 for non-fiber). Frontier also has a dramatic difference (74 fiber and 61 non-fiber). The only cable company ranked for both technologies also has a sizeable difference, and Comcast has a ranking of 73 for its fiber network versus 68 for the coaxial network.

Customer satisfaction involves many other factors than just technology, but the differences for the companies that offer multiple technologies have to be mostly related to fiber. However, there are other factors in play. For example, it seems likely that CenturyLink and Frontier provide better customer service and faster repairs for fiber customers than for DSL customers.

Cable companies have to be noticing this giant difference as part of any consideration of how to upgrade their networks. The big cable companies are all at the beginning of the upgrades to improve upload speeds on coaxial networks, and they must be hoping that customers like them more after the upgrades. But there is a chance that the public has come to think of fiber as a superior technology and will not rank a coaxial system as highly even after speed increases. There is still a noticeable difference in latency and jitter between cable and fiber networks, and customers who see both in action believe fiber is better.

There is still a noticeable range of ISP rankings within each list. Non-fiber customers rate T-Mobile and AT&T the highest and rank Altice and Frontier DSL as the worst ISPs. It’s interesting to see Charter near the bottom of the rankings.

Fiber customers clearly rate AT&T as the best and Comcast Fiber as the lowest. Fiber technical performance should be consistent regardless of the ISP, so the difference in rankings between fiber providers has to be related to customer service and the other non-technical aspects of being an ISP.

Is Fiber Growth Slowing?

In a recent article in LightReading, Mike Dano cites data from industry analyst Cowan that shows that some of the largest fiber builders in the country have already trimmed back their construction plans for 2023.

AT&T has the largest retrenchment and is trimming 2023 plans from 3.5 to 4 million passings back to 2 to 2.5 million. The company says that it is not changing its long-term goal to reach 30 million passings with fiber, but a cutback of this size means it won’t likely reach that target in 2025.

Lumen’s new CEO Kate Johnson said the company is taking a pause while it rethinks its path forward. In doing so, the company trimmed 2023 fiber expansion plans from 1.75 million passings to something under 1 million.

Cowen says other big ISPs will also trim plans a bit. Frontier is probably trimming 2023 plans from 1.6 million to 1.4 million passings. Altice is cutting expectations back from 1.6 million to 1.5 million. Consolidated is reducing 400,000 planned new passings to 350,000.

There are other fiber builders that don’t seem to be cutting plans. Brightspeed, Metronet, and others still seem to be on track for their 2023 plans.

But cutbacks of the size of the AT&T and Lumen plans raise some questions about the trajectory of fiber overbuilding. If construction plans announced two years ago had held steady, there was a massive push to build fiber networks to compete with cable companies. Do these cuts mean that fiber competition won’t materialize as planned?

There have been big external changes affecting the entire industry. Fiber material costs are up, as evidenced by the recent price hike announced by Corning. Prices of fiber components are up across the board for everything from conduit, handholes, drop wires, etc. A bigger cost impact is the cost of labor, with technicians labor rates rising across the industry.

Fiber construction is also not immune from interest rate increases. I already have some clients thinking of shelving fiber expansion projects until interest rates come back to earth.

All of this adds up to a lower return for fiber builders. I was always a bit mystified by the frenetic planned pace of fiber expansion craze in cities since the returns have never been spectacular. I’ve always assumed the push to build fiber has been more of a land grab as big ISPs see other fiber builders encroach on areas they want as markets. I think much of the fiber construction craze has been about either building now or getting locked out of markets in the future.

Any level of cutbacks is good news for cable companies, since the above cutbacks mean several million fewer fiber passings to compete with by the end of 2023. Any relaxing of the competitive pressure gives cable companies more time to upgrade upload speeds over the next three years. I have to wonder if the cable company’s plans to increase upload speeds play into any of the decisions to cut back on fiber expansion. It would be really interesting to sit inside the Board rooms as the big ISPs debate these strategies. The broadband environment is getting more complex by the day.

Cable Company Cellular Growing

Cable companies are starting to quietly build a significant cellular business to bundle with broadband and other products. Consider the most recent customer count from the eight largest U.S. cellular carriers:

Verizon 143.0 M
T-Mobile 110.2 M
AT&T 101.6 M
Dish 8.5 M
US Cellular 4.9 M
Comcast 4.6 M
Charter 4.3 M
C-Spire 1.2 M

It’s worth noting that AT&T has over 200 million cellular customers worldwide, which makes them the eleventh largest cellular carrier in the world, with China Mobile first with over 851 million customers.

Comcast’s Xfinity Mobile added 317,000 customers in the second quarter of this year to bring the company to a total of 4.6 million customers. Comcast mostly uses the Verizon network to complete calls. However, Comcast demonstrates the major benefit of a cable company being in the cellular business since the company is able to offload a large portion of its outgoing mobile traffic to its WiFi network. Comcast has been experimenting with the use of 600 MHz spectrum to carry some of its cellular traffic. The company purchased $1.7 billion of spectrum in the 2017 incentive auction that freed up spectrum formerly used by television channels. Comcast also purchased $458 million of CBRS spectrum in 2020. The company says it may selectively offload traffic onto licensed spectrum in places where that is cheaper than buying wholesale minutes.

Charter’s Spectrum Mobile added 344,000 mobile customers in the second quarter of the year to bring the company to 4.3 million customers. Spectrum also uses the Verizon network. Charter purchased $464 million of PAL licenses in the CBRS spectrum in 2020. Charter says it intends to place its own radios in high-traffic areas where that will save money. Charter’s CEO Brian Roberts said a few months ago that Charter saw $700 million in new revenues from cellular over the past twelve months.

Altice has been selling mobile services branded as Optimum Mobile for several years and added 33,000 customers in the second quarter, bringing the company to 231,000 total mobile customers. Altice uses the T-Mobile network.

Cox announced the launch of a mobile pilot program on August 29, launching Cox Mobile in Hampton Roads, Virginia, Omaha, Nebraska, and Las Vegas.

All of these companies have a huge potential upside. For example, the mobile customer penetration rate for both Comcast and Charter is under 10%, and both companies believe they can become major mobile players in their markets.

The cable companies face an unusual marketing challenge since each cable company is only in selected urban markets, meaning that a lot of nationwide advertising goes to waste.

The primary reason that Comcast first entered the mobile market was to develop another product that would create a stickier bundle. Comcast figured it would be hard for a customer to leave if that meant finding a new cellular carrier along with a new ISP. Cable companies are still only selling to their own broadband customers, which is a good indication bundling is still a key reason for doing this. It’s also less costly to sell cellular to households that can offload cellular traffic to the cable company broadband network.

The big three cellular carriers have continued to grow in recent years, but the cable companies have definitely made a dent in the market with almost ten million retail mobile customers. The real test for the cellular industry is going to come when Dish finally gets its act together and offers low-cost mobile service in most markets. That’s going to put price pressure on everybody else. If Dish starts a price war, as promised, we’re going to see a real shake-up.

 

 

Cable Companies Converting to Fiber

I wrote a recent blog discussing comments from Chris Sambar, AT&T’s EVP of Technology Operations who was quoted as saying that he almost feels sorry for cable companies that compete against AT&T fiber. AT&T is convinced that building fiber is a winning strategy and that the first company that builds fiber in a market will win the majority of broadband customers.

While it’s not yet a giant movement, we do see cable companies that are converting to fiber. One example comes from an announcement by Cox that it will be undertaking a project in the Hampton Roads area to upgrade its networks to 10-gigabit fiber. The build will start this year in Norfolk and will extend over time to the rest of this rapidly-growing area.

Atlantic Broadband recently announced plans to extend fiber to 70,000 passings in New England and West Virginia. This will include the communities of Concord, Dover, Somerset, Durham, and Madbury in New Hampshire and Westover, Morgantown, Granville, and Star City in West Virginia.

Altice recently renewed its pledge to convert all of its 4.4 million customers to fiber. The Chairman of Altice, Patrick Drahi, announced he would convert the company to fiber in 2015 when the company acquired Suddenlink and Cable vision. However, the conversion to fiber slowed and has only covered about one-eighth of the company’s 9.2 million passings. Altice is back in the news with an announcement that it will expand fiber to 1 million new locations in 2022, mostly in the northeast.

We can’t forget Charter, which is planning to build fiber in the suburban and rural areas surrounding its current markets. The company won bids in the RDOF reverse auction for a million rural passings. The company is expected to chase state and federal grants to fill in the pockets won in the RDOF auction.

All of these fiber plans still only represent a relatively small share of the 75.2 million broadband customers served by the eight largest cable companies. But this start of a trend towards fiber raises some interesting questions. It’s hard to tell as someone who works inside the industry, but my sense is that the general public has become convinced that fiber is the superior technology. That perception bodes well for AT&T and anybody that builds fiber to compete against a cable company.

More importantly, a preference for fiber bodes poorly in the long run for any cable company that doesn’t have plans to get faster. Converting to fiber is a tough strategic decision for a cable company to face. Many have been putting their hopes on DOCSIS 4.0 and thought they had plenty of time to make that transition. But the pandemic seems to have moved up the timeline drastically by highlighting the weakness of cable company upload speeds. In the surveys my firm has done in the last two years, we’ve consistently seen 30% of cable customers complaining that they had problems working and schooling from home. That’s a lot of people who are deciding they’d rather have somebody other than the cable companies as an ISP.

Customers Still Flock to Promotional Rates

FierceVideo and others recently reported on a survey done in June by the research firm Cowen that looked at consumer use of promotional rates.

Cowen found that 20% of big ISP subscribers are on Internet plans that have promotional rates that will expire within the next 12 months. Another 13% of subscribers are on promotional plans that will expire in a time frame longer than 12 months. Surprisingly, 10% of subscribers have price-for-life guarantees. This leaves just 57% of subscribers paying full price for ISP services.

Promotional pricing is a sensitive topic for the industry and none of the big cable companies or telcos disclose the volume or amounts of discounts they give to customers. The big ISPs are all under a lot of pressure from Wall Street, and one of the key metrics used by analysts to track the big companies is ARPU – average revenue per user. ISPs have hard decisions to make. Giving too many discounts can kill ARPU, but not offering discounts can lose customers and revenues.

Some big ISPs have been working to curtail promotional pricing. AT&T has lost nearly three million video customers in the last year and claims that the losses mostly are due to tightening the promotional pricing that was given in the past by DirecTV. It’s also been reported that Charter has been tightening its policies on promotional prices, and in particular was ending a huge volume of promotional pricing they inherited through the acquisition of Time Warner Cable.

The Cowen report highlighted the difference in discount philosophy varies by ISP. For example, the report said that 45% of Altice customers have a promotional package, Comcast has 42%, and Charter is at 32%.

The big ISPs dole out promotional discounts in a few different ways. All of the incumbent ISPs offer low prices on the web to attract new customers. These new customer discounts generally last for 12 to 24 months before customers are moved to normal pricing. The other big category of promotional discounts is discounts that are negotiated with customers, often when customers threaten to leave an ISP.

The Cowen study confirmed something that we’ve always seen in the market. The promotional prices tend to go to younger subscribers, and older customers tend to pay full price for services. It takes real effort to either change ISPs or to renegotiate pricing every year or two, and only consumers willing to go through that hassle end up with a repetitive series of promotional deals.

The statistic that surprised me was that 10% of respondents in the survey said they had lifetime rates. ISPs have been somewhat leery of using the ‘lifetime rate’ words, but over the years as ISPs increased speeds and prices on their networks they have often allowed customers to stick with slower and less expensive broadband – generally with the caveat that a customer with a grandfathered plan can make no changes without being moved to newer pricing. In my mind, there is a significant difference between grandfathering an existing plan that offers slower speeds than other customers compared to new lifetime sales promotions that offer such deals to new customers. One of the biggest advantages to the ISPs of grandfathered plans is that customers keep these plans for years, meaning no churn.

Small ISPs struggle with promotional rates. Some small ISPs that still offer video offer guaranteed bundled rates for customers who buy cable TV. But I know a number of small ISPs that have ceased offering bundled discounts since the margins on cable TV are too small to afford them.

Small ISPs also generally don’t like the hassle of always having to negotiate rates with customers seeking a discount. Negotiating with customers changes the culture in a call center and adds a lot of pressure to customer service reps – and is probably the number one reason why the public dislikes big ISP customer service.

Many small ISPs have also given up on the idea of having residential service contracts. It’s a major pain to collect from somebody who breaks a contract and drops service. Most of the small ISPs I know feel that their quality of service is superior to the competition and they don’t want to fight to keep unhappy customers.

The Quiet Growth of the Quad Play

A few years ago, some of the largest cable companies announced they were getting into the cellular business. At the time, this got a tiny amount of press but overall the press didn’t take these companies seriously or consider them to be potential major players in the cellular business.

Comcast Charter and Altice have quietly been adding cellular customers over the last three years.

  • Comcast recently reported that the company added 216,000 cellular lines during the first quarter of 2020, bringing their total lines to 2.3 million.
  • Charter added 290,000 customers in the first quarter, bringing the company to 1.4 million mobile lines.
  • Altice added 41,000 customers in the first quarter, bringing them to 110,000 mobile lines.

These growth and total customer numbers may not sound spectacular but consider that in the first quarter saw AT&T add a small number of net customers and Verizon lose a small number of net customers. These three cable companies are definitely eating into the market growth of the big carriers. Craig Moffett, the leading analyst for the communications sector declared last December that the cable companies must be considered as serious players in the cellular space.

For now, all three companies are acting as MVNOs and are purchasing wholesale cellular minutes and data from the big cellular carriers. But that won’t last forever. Comcast has made it clear that the company is in the wireless game for the long-haul. The company purchased $1.7 billion in white space spectrum in the Philadelphia market in 2017 and said that it will be bidding in the upcoming CMRS auction.

A company like Comcast doesn’t need to worry about rolling out a big national network like Dish Networks is tackling. Comcast can improve margins on the cellular business by selectively deploying cell sites in parts of markets where they have the highest traffic volumes. Comcast should be able to deploy small cells selectively in their major urban markets and be able to peel a lot of minutes off the MVNO arrangements where it makes sense. That would significantly increase their margins.

The cable companies have something in their favor that the cellular companies can’t match – the ability to bundle inexpensive cellular service in with products that customers value like home broadband. Each of the three cable companies is only offering cellular to existing customers.

Consider the Comcast plan. It’s only available to Comcast broadband customers. Customers have a choice of four data plans 1 GB for $15 per month, 3 GB for $30 per month, $10 GB for $60 per month, or unlimited data for $45 per phone. All of these plans include unlimited calling and texting. A customer can add up to 5 devices for a plan, and that can include phones for multiple family members, tablets, etc.

I have a friend who bought the Comcast plan when it first came out and it cut her family’s cellphone bills in half. The quality is as good as when they were AT&T subscribers, and their usage is likely still riding the AT&T network.

The big cellular companies have stopped growing. They’ve seen cellular prices drop over the last two years and their revenue per customer is dropping. AT&T and Verizon will start feeling real pain if the cellular companies continue to take more than half a million customers per quarter. The two companies are faced with T-Mobile greatly expanding its number of cell sites to meet the terms of the merger with Sprint. And both companies have to worried about seeing Dish Networks hit the market in two years or so with the most modern 5G network that will be software-driven.

Americans love bundles and it’s likely that the word will continue to spread that cable companies can save them money on their cellular plan. As word of mouth continues to spread that the cable companies are in the business to stay, these companies are likely to accelerate customer acquisition. The FCC was worried about losing Sprint from the market and made the T-Mobile merger contingent upon having Dish enter the cellular business. I’m guessing they didn’t take the competition from the cable companies seriously – but over time we are likely to see real competition for our cellular business.

Do Cable Companies Have a Wireless Advantage?

The big wireless companies have been wrangling for years with the issues associated with placing small cells on poles. Even with new FCC rules in their favor, they are still getting a lot of resistance from communities. Maybe the future of urban/suburban wireless lies with the big cable companies. Cable companies have a few major cost advantages over the wireless companies including the ability to bypass the pole issue.

The first advantage is the ability to deploy mid-span cellular small cells. These are cylindrical devices that can be placed along the coaxial cable between poles. I could not find a picture of these devices and the picture accompanying this article is of a strand-mounted fiber splice box – but it’s s good analogy since the size and shape of the strand-mounted small cell device is approximately the same size and shape.

Strand-mounted small cells provide a cable company with a huge advantage. First, they don’t need to go through the hassle of getting access to poles and they avoid paying the annual fees to rent space on poles. They also avoid the issue of fiber backhaul since each unit can get broadband using a DOCSIS 3.1 modem connection. The cellular companies don’t talk about backhaul a lot when they discuss small cells, but since they don’t own fiber everywhere, they will be paying a lot of money to other parties to transport broadband to the many small cells they are deploying.

The cable companies also benefit because they could quickly deploy small cells anywhere they have coaxial cable on poles. In the future when wireless networks might need to be very dense the cable companies could deploy a small cell between every pair of poles. If the revenue benefits of providing small cells is great enough, this could even prompt the cable companies to expand the coaxial network to nearby neighborhoods that might not otherwise meet their density tests, which for most cable companies is to only build where there are at least 15 to 20 potential customers per linear mile of cable.

The cable companies have another advantage over the cellular carriers in that they have already deployed a vast WiFi network comprised of customer WiFi modems. Comcast claims to have 19 million WiFi hotspots. Charter has a much smaller 500,000 hotspots but could expand that count quickly if needed. Altice is reportedly investing in WiFi hotspots as well. The big advantage of WiFi hotspots is that the broadband capacity of the hotspots can be tapped to act as landline backhaul for cellular data and even voice calls.

The biggest cable companies are already benefitting from WiFi backhaul today. Comcast just reported to investors that they added 204,000 wireless customers in the third quarter of 2019 and now have almost 1.8 million wireless customers. Charter is newer to the wireless business and added 276,000 wireless customers in the third quarter and now has almost 800,000 wireless customers.

Both companies are buying wholesale cellular capacity from Verizon under an MVNO contract. Any cellular minute or cellular data they can backhaul with WiFi doesn’t have to be purchased from Verizon. If the companies build small cells, they would further free themselves from the MVNO arrangement – another cost savings.

A final advantage for the cable companies is that they are deploying small cell networks where they already have a workforce to maintain the network. Bother AT&T and Verizon have laid off huge numbers of workers over the last few years and no longer have the fleets of technicians in all of the markets where they need to deploy cellular networks. These companies are faced with adding technicians where their network is expanding from a few big-tower cell sites to vast networks of small cells.

The cable companies don’t have nearly as much spectrum as they wireless companies, but they might not need it. The cable companies will likely buy spectrum in the upcoming CBRS auction and the other mid-range spectrum auctions over the next few years. They can use the 80 MHz of free CBRS spectrum that’s available everywhere.

These advantages equate to a big cost advantage for the cable companies. They save on speed to market and avoid paying for pole-mounted small cells. Their networks can provide the needed backhaul for practically free. They can offload a lot of cellular data through the customer WiFi hotspots. And the cable companies already have a staff to maintain the small cell sites. At least in the places that have aerial coaxial networks, the cellular companies should have higher margins than the cellular companies and should be formidable competitors.