Tag Archives: GFiber

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 March 2026

The following are a few topics I found interesting but which are two short to need a full blog.

Acquisitions Changing the Broadband Landscape. We’ve recently seen the closing of a number of major mergers and sales that are changing the broadband landscape.

  • On January 20, the sale of Frontier to Verizon closed. This $20 billion blockbuster sale brought 2.2 million fiber subscribers and eight million passings. Long-time followers of the industry are somewhat amused to see Verizon buy back millions of passings it sold to Frontier in the past.
  • On February 2, AT&T closed the sale of over 1 million fiber customers from Lumen, which brought four million fiber passings. This included customers in major markets like Denver, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Orlando, and Phoenix.
  • On March 10, the sale of Starry to Verizon closed. While bringing only 100,000 customers, the acquisition also brings Starry’s proprietary technology that uses 28/39 GHz millimeter wave spectrum to deliver wireless broadband, mostly to MDUs. The speculation is that Verizon will use the technology to expand to MDUs outside of its fiber footprint.
  • The huge merger between Charter and Cox Communications is still pending. The merger recently got approved by the FCC and still needs approval from several states. Cox would bring around 6 million broadband customers and 12 million passing to Charter, making the combined company the largest ISP in the country.
  • GFiber just announced a merger with Astound Broadband that would spin GFiber from Google Alphabet.

Action in the NDIA Suit. The U.S. Department of Justice sought to dismiss the lawsuit filed by the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) that challenged the administration’s refusal to disperse the grant funding approved by Congress from the Digital Equity Act. These grants were aimed at tackling digital inclusion efforts that included bringing broadband devices to those that need them, training people how to use computers and broadband, and training for broadband-related jobs. The NDIA suit was first filed in early October 2025. I note the DOJ motion since the agency has had a low success rate in defending executive actions that killed various other federal grants. I think there is still a chance that this funding will eventually be awarded as intended.

AI Fueling Surge in Deepfake Spam. Hiya, a service that provides apps to block spam calls, released its State of the Call 2026 report, which says that AI is fueling an increase in spam calls. A survey of over 12,000 consumers across the  U.S., UK, Canada, France, Germany, and Spain showed a rise of deepfake calls, which use AI to mimic voices that are familiar to those being called. One in four Americans said they received a deepfake voice call in the last year. Americans said by nearly 2-to-1 that spammers are winning the battle over the FCC, which is trying to squelch spam calls.

AT&T Partnership with Amazon. AT&T, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Amazon Leo announced a broadband collaboration this week that integrates AT&T into the AI and cloud capabilities of AWS. AT&T will become the preferred vendor to provide connectivity to AWS data centers. Amazon LEO has an existing arrangement with Verizon to bring fiber to ground stations, and it will be interesting over time to see if that business shifts to AT&T.

AT&T will partner with Amazon Leo to provide satellite broadband connectivity to some AT&T broadband customers. This is an interesting solution that could help AT&T more easily walk away from rural copper networks. AT&T also wants to bring satellite backup broadband to AT&T business customers.

50G PON

Nokia and GFiber (Google Fiber) recently announced that the two companies collaborated on a live field trial of 50G PON technology. GFiber is already deploying Nokia 25G PON and says the 50G PON can overlay on that platform. Nokia now has 10G and 25G PON available to ISPs, the 50G PON in field trial, and 100G PON available as a lab demo.

In the GFiber test, the company was able to simultaneously operate both the 10G and 25G PON, and also the 25G and the 50G PON together. Nokia says there is now more than a dozen ISPs using the 25G PON worldwide. The company also says there are now five ONT vendors supporting 25G PON and more than sixty vendors on board in some aspect of the product, including chipset and optical suppliers. The next step for 50G PON would be to introduce it to industry vendors.

Nokia has chosen a unique technology path for the 50G PON. The upstream link for the technology can only transmit data for short, intensive bursts at preset time slots. This makes the electronics for 50G more complicated. This is also a variation from the industry standard that is being developed by the Chinese. This kind of disparity can cause issues with the supply chain if vendors support different versions of the solution. Nokia says their solution was needed since the technology is pushing the limits of physics.

Probably the most important question is if ISPs will be interested in 50G PON. It’s not unusual today for ISPS using PON for residential service to still use active Ethernet when connecting to large business customers that want speeds greater than 10 Gbps. Most PON vendors have electronics that will selectively support PON or ActiveE over specific fibers. However, an ISP operating a network with a lot of large broadband users, like a network supporting cell sites, might prefer the benefits of PON over activeE, with the primary being that one fiber could be used to support multiple cellular towers or other large customers from a single fiber.

The primary question is if 50G PON brings any benefits to ISPs serving residential and small business customers. Skeptics will say that we don’t need technology at these faster speeds. But in only twenty years, we’ve gone from broadband delivered by dial-up to bandwidth delivered by 10-gigabit technology on XGS-PON. None of these skeptics can envision the demands for data that can be unleashed over the next decade or two. If there is any lesson we’ve learned from the computer age, it’s that we always find a way to use faster technology within a short time after it’s developed. But it’s still a giant technology leap from 2.5 GB on GPON to 50G PON.

Most of the vendors that make or will be making 25G and 50G PON argue that the faster PON networks are cheaper on a per-customer basis. But I have to wonder if that is really true if ISPS don’t use the full capacity of the technology. The vast majority of ISPs using GPON limit the number of customers on a given PON neighborhood to no more than 32 customers. The upgrade to XGS-PON allows an ISP to easily put 128 customers into a neighborhood PON. The 25G and 50G PON platforms would allow a lot more customers on a single PON.

One of the inherent advantages of PON is that a card failure or fiber cut in a neighborhood doesn’t take many customers out of service. Most ISPs I work with will not want to risk putting hundreds of customers on the same PON if that increase risk of large scale outages. Over the past decade, cable companies have greatly reduced the size of their nodes to the range of 100 customers, and fiber providers should be careful to not give away one of their primary advantages over cable.