Matt Daneman

From breaking out the cost of renting a cable modem on customers' bills to making any conditions indefinite, opponents of Charter Communications buying Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable put multiple proposed conditions before the FCC by the Thursday deadline for replies or responses to opposition. Parties argued in comments posted Friday in docket 15-149 for conditions to govern New Charter activities if the $89.1 billion pair of deals were to go through. Multiple Charter/TWC/BHN filings urged outright, unconditional opposition, often pointing to possible injury to online video distribution (OVD). "The single biggest barrier to providing video services is obtaining access to reasonably priced programming, followed by competing with other providers," NTCA said in its filing. "This merger will exacerbate both of these significant competitive issues."

Major corporate investment in satellite systems is likely to grow, financing experts said Tuesday in New York at SatCon. As "the Googles of the world" step into this space, "it's something for the industry to take advantage of," said John Schuster, principal with 32 Advisors' Project and Structured Finance practice. Satellite mergers and acquisitions -- slower than expected in recent years -- almost surely will pick up, said Randy Russell, co-head of Americas Telecom Investment Banking at Deutsche Bank.

Some C-band spectrum almost surely will end up allocated to mobile broadband usage, though the satellite industry remains concerned about protecting the rest, industry experts said in New York Wednesday at SatCon. The satellite industry has indicated C-band reallocation issues will be a major fight at the ongoing World Radiocommunications Conference in Geneva (see 1501150050).

The FCC expects “significant” broadcaster and wireless industry interest in March's incentive auction, said Howard Symons, vice chairman of the FCC's incentive auction task force, Thursday at NAB's Content and Communications World show in New York. Agency representatives have met with hundreds of broadcasters about the auction, but Symons gave no specifics on level of participation expected. "The interest is broad and deep," he said, the same as it is among carriers.

JPMorgan Chase agreed to put its interest in post-bankruptcy LightSquared into a proxy, which would clear the path for the FCC to approve a transfer of licenses, the last thing LightSquared needs before U.S. Bankruptcy Court approves its final emergence from Chapter 11 reorganization, LightSquared counsel Gerard Waldron of Covington & Burling told us Monday. The filing posted Friday in docket 15-126 said the bank agreed RL2 Investors Holdings or another of its affiliates will hold its minority, noncontrolling equity interests in reconstituted LightSquared.

Pointing to possible harm to the over-the-top (OTT) market, Dish Network officials want the FCC to deny approval of Charter Communications buying Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable. Dish was a major opponent of Comcast's now-dead attempt at buying TWC, citing potential harm to OTT competition. "The only difference [this time] is Charter doesn't own NBC," Dish CEO Charlie Ergen said Monday in a conference call on Q3 financial results. Some thought his comments on the incentive auction, meanwhile, signaled Dish may not go big on the auction.

LTE-U continues to raise red flags with some Wi-Fi backers, as CableLabs said its tests showed Wi-Fi performance "suffered disproportionately in the presence of LTE-U." The testing, using a pair of off-the-shelf Wi-Fi access points and an LTE-U signal generator, found that Wi-Fi throughput was degraded 70 percent when LTE-U was at a 50 percent cycle, with the throughput declining as the duty cycle increased, Jennifer Andreoli-Fang, CableLabs principal architect, said in a blog post Friday.

Suddenlink still expects its purchase by Altice to close by year’s end as it makes "steady progress" on regulatory approvals, CEO Jerry Kent said Thursday, announcing its Q3 results. Transition planning is underway, with the new management team to be announced at closing, Kent said, saying he wouldn't remain with the company. The company didn’t take any questions on the $9.1 billion takeover by Altice, which many don't expect to face substantial regulatory hurdles (see 1509170015). The company has increased broadband speeds in 104 markets, with its upgrade to a new flagship speed of 50 Mbps largely complete, it said. As of Sept. 1, 13 Suddenlink markets offer 1 Gbps speeds, and another 15 will by year's end, it said. In response to a question about over-the-top video growth, Kent said it will lead to some unbundling of video packages due to the rapidly rising costs of video. Meanwhile, the cable industry is unlikely to look at overage charges as a sizable revenue stream because that could quickly lead to more customer churn, he said. In response to a question about the importance of wireless to the cable industry, Kent said it plays a bigger potential role with companies with a national footprint. "For a company like us, it's going to be difficult to mesh in wireless," he said, saying he was curious what AT&T/DirecTV does. But a quadruple-play offering "will definitely be something offered by the really large operators in this space," he said.

Cox Communications agreed to pay $595,000 to end an FCC Enforcement Bureau investigation regarding its seeming failure to protect subscribers' personal data from a hacker. The FCC said it was its first privacy and data security enforcement action involving a cable operator. Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy at the nonprofit Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, said he wasn't aware of any others involving any other regulator.

John Malone is increasingly in the spotlight as part of the review of Charter Communications buying Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable, as was expected (see 1508140001). The chairman of Liberty Media -- the single largest Charter shareholder -- came up repeatedly in comments posted Tuesday in docket 15-149 after the Monday deadline for replies to any comments in opposition to the $89.1 billion deals. Meanwhile, the Media Bureau requested information from Liberty Broadband, Liberty Interactive and Liberty Media (see here, here and here) as part of its review, including details on any involvement by Malone or other company officers in decisions by Discovery, Starz or any other programmer on what programming is presented and whether to distribute any video programming to a multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD) or online video distributor (OVD). Malone is also chairman of Liberty Broadband and Liberty Interactive.