Tag Archives: WOW

Foreign Ownership of ISPs

I saw a recent announcement that the FCC’s Wireless Competition Bureau had approved the transfer of WideOpenWest to Japan’s Softbank Group. WideOpenWest is the eighth-largest cable company, which operates under the brand name of WOW! The proposed transaction has Softbank buying the DigitalBridge Group, which is WOW!’s majority owner. This deal was announced at the end of 2025, just a few days before DigitalBridge and Crestview Partners took WOW! private.

The blog raises the question about foreign ownership of ISPs because the current administration has put a huge amount of emphasis on America First, which emphasizes, among other things, domestic ownership of corporations doing business in the country. There has been a statutory limit on foreign ownership in U.S. corporations that hold common carrier status or hold broadcast licenses that was created by the Telecommunications Act of 1934. However, the FCC has the ability to waive the 25% limit if it thinks the foreign ownership is in the public interest.

What prompted my question was that the FCC just announced a ban on foreign-made advanced robotic devices. This ban covers all mechanical devices, including autonomous mobile robots, humanoid robots, and quadrupeds that are capable of locomotion, obstacle avoidance, navigation, or movement that operate at a distance from a human operator.

The FCC ban was done by adding foreign-made robots to the Covered List, which is a list the FCC maintains of electronics and devices that are banned from the U.S. At the same time the FCC banned robots, they also banned foreign-made power inverters. At least for now, this ban would even stop the sale of Roombas and other automated vacuums. The FCC knew this ban would be controversial and published a lengthy FAQ about the robot and power-inverter bans. You may recall that the FCC added WiFi modems to the covered list recently.

Assuming that the WOW! transaction will be completed, they won’t be the only foreign-owned ISP in the country. The biggest is T-Mobile, with a majority ownership by the German firm Deutsche Telekom. I wrote a blog recently talking about how Deutsche Telekom is trying to merge with T-Mobile to increase the ability of T-Mobile to expand and grow much larger. It seems likely that if Deutsche Telekom can pull off this merger, the combined company would pursue the acquisition of other large U.S. ISPs. Timotheus Höttges, the CEO of Deutsche Telekom, thinks T-Mobile should be competing on an equal footing with AT&T and Verizon.

Another foreign-owned ISP is Altice USA, which is owned by the French-Israeli billionaire Patrick Drahi, who holds the 74% of shares of stock and 98% of the voting rights of the company. Altice operates under the brand name Optimum and has almost 5 million customers in 21 states. I’ve written several blogs about Altice, which is currently facing a major debt crisis. The company has $21.8 billion in debt, with a payment of $6.2 billion due in 2027. Altice has sued two of its major creditors of the company, Blackrock and Apollo Asset Management, claiming they are blocking the company from refinancing the debt.

Another foreign-owned ISP is Zipley, which is owned by BCE Inc (Bell Canada Enterprises). BCE acquired Zipley for $5 billion in 2025 after receiving a foreign ownership waiver from the FCC.

I don’t have a strong opinion about foreign ownership of ISPs. But I do find it curious that most of the other bans, like robots and WiFi modems, are being done for national security reasons. I can’t think of many industries that we care about more than those that operate and control access to the Internet, and I find it curious that the FCC continues to make exceptions to the 25% foreign ownership cap without much public debate.

Broadband Subscribers 3Q 2025

I recently looked at the reported broadband subscriber counts from the largest publicly traded ISPs. Most of these statistics come from the quarterly reports of the ISPs. I decided to look at the change in broadband subscribers compared to last year, which I suspect tells more of a story than looking at the change only for the most recent quarter.

There are not a lot of surprises. Cable companies are losing customers, telcos have started to add net customers, and FWA cellular wireless ISPs still dominate the industry in terms of customer acquisition.By reading the industry press, one might assume that cable companies are bleeding customers. The losses for the sector are significant, at over a 2% loss of customers over a year, but not as high as you might expect.

Telcos have definitely turned the corner after having suffered losses annually over the last decade as customers bailed on DSL. These companies are still losing DSL customers, which masks the significant growth of fiber subscribers.

FWA growth continues to be astounding. The third quarter of 2025 saw the biggest quarterly gain yet of over 1 million new customers, and AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon account for most of the overall gain in broadband customers for the industry.

Outside of the FWA carriers, the biggest percentage gainers were Frontier and Shentel. The biggest percentage losers were Lumen and WOW!.

This chart will change going forward. Frontier should be merging with Verizon. Cox, which isn’t on the list because it’s privately held, should be merging with Charter. A lot of Lumen fiber customers will be moving to AT&T.

Do the Big Companies Even Want to Get it Right?

020916-F-4728F-001The latest Consumer Reports rankings are out for telecom providers, and the results are much the same as in past years. There are many different groups that rate companies and we often hear of reports that put the cable companies at the bottom of all companies in terms of customer service.

But the Consumer Reports ranking is more comprehensive. It looks at a lot of factors such as the perceived value that customers see with the provide, reliability, speeds, and support both in the home and over the phone. And they compare all of the major telecom companies and don’t compare to other industries.

Not surprisingly, HughesNet and their satellite broadband ranks the lowest. I’ve never heard anybody talk nicely about their product since it’s slow, costly and also has a lot of latency and delays. Many people say it is barely better than dial-up. It will be interesting to see how satellite ranks now that Exede is in the market with a faster product. As I reported a few weeks ago, the issue with Exede is the low total data caps, but at least the 12 mbps download is a huge improvement.

Ranked next to satellite is MediaCom which always comes in dead last among cable and telcos. Ranked next at the bottom are the various DSL providers, with Frontier, Fairpoint, Windstream and AT&T DSL. For the most part the customers on these services have older DSL technology that is only delivering a few Mbps download speeds. There is faster DSL technology available today and better ways to deploy it by bringing the DSLAMs closer to customers, but the companies listed are for the most part not pumping much money into DSL. The exception is Frontier who has gotten a pile of federal subsidy money from the new USF fund to upgrade and expand its DSL footprint.

But right next to this old DSL technology is Comcast, followed closely by Verizon DSL and then Time Warner. Verizon barely even advertises that it has DSL anymore and it is a surprise to see it more favorable with customers than Comcast.

At the top of the list and doing the best job are the smaller cable companies and fiber providers. At the top of the list are WOW and Wave (Astound) followed by Verizon FiOS.

It just amazes me to see these large companies like Comcast and Time Warner do so poorly with their customer service. They have been at the bottom of these kinds of rankings for well over a decade now and it’s obvious that they are willing to live with giving poor service. When you look at the rankings and see that Comcast is viewed by customers to be doing a worse job than Verizon and CenturyLink DSL you just have to shake your head.

It’s very obvious that they don’t care to become better because by spending some money they could do much better. Doing customer service well is not some unreachable mountain of a task. Thousands of companies do it well. If WOW and Astound can do it well, so can Comcast and Time Warner. It’s a matter of investing in the right systems, the right training and the right management of the process. Being big is not an excuse for being crappy, and if it is a valid excuse, then this alone ought to stop the Comcast / Time Warner merger.

I would think that the management of these companies would hate seeing themselves at the bottom of these lists. But they obviously like profits more than they hate doing a poor job. And that is what I don’t get. These companies have lost millions of customers due to dissatisfaction with their service and their best growth strategy is to lure back customers in their existing markets by doing a better job.