Charter Communications' "most consistent download speeds" TV advertising claim for its internet service is supported by the FCC's Measuring Broadband America report, the Better Business Bureau's National Advertising Division said Wednesday. The Charter ad claim was challenged by AT&T.

The Service Employees International Union's Pension Plans Master Trust put a shareholder proposal on lobbying disclosures on the agenda for Charter Communications' annual shareholders meeting April 25. Per the company's 2023 proxy statement, put out Thursday, Charter shareholders will vote on requiring the company to prepare an annual report about its lobbying policies and procedures and money spent on direct and indirect lobbying and on grassroots lobbying communications. Charter's board, advocating a "no" vote on the proposal, said its current disclosures "are appropriate and consistent with the objectives of transparency and accountability reflected in the proposal."

Some National Content & Technology Cooperative cable operator members could start launching mobile service as soon as late Q2 or Q3 under an mobile virtual network operator agreement NCTC announced Tuesday with Reach Mobile, NCTC CEO Lou Borrelli said. In an interview, he and Reach CEO Harjot Saluja said the Reach offering was designed with different levels of customization available to NCTC's cable operator membership, with a handful of choices at the simplest end to more customization available at the other. All three service tiers give a white-labeled service with Reach providing back-office services and support, Saluja said. Borrelli said handsets will be available via Reach, but most subscribers coming through NCTC member companies will likely provide their own. Smaller cable operators generally don't have storefronts and likely won't "want to get into the whole retail/inventory experience," he said. They said NCTC member companies will have their own app in the Google Play and Apple's App Store where their customers can activate and manage their plans. Under the agreement, NCTC still has to select the underlying wireless network that will be offered to members. Borrelli said the co-op is still in discussions with carriers. Even minus NCTC members with their own arrangements with mobile network operators, more than 20 million customers of NCTC members would be eligible under the offering Borrelli said.

Comcast wasn't a big participant in the FCC's rural digital opportunity fund program, but it will likely try to be a bigger player in NTIA's broadband equity, access and deployment program, Chief Financial Officer Jason Armstrong said Monday during a Deutsche Bank Investor Conference. RDOF was more an "untested" program that didn't have "the best risk/reward," he said. BEAD funding to states is "a more seasoned process," he said. He said fiber overbuilding is picking up in Comcast's footprint but discounted the competitive threat. He said 45% of homes in Comcast's footprint also are passed by a fiber competitor, with that going to 60% within a few years. But fiber "is a costly upgrade" and cable is able to upgrade to multigig symmetrical speeds far more cheaply, he said. He said fixed wireless providers are "clearly having their moment" but won't be a long-term competitor.

Altice is modifying its fiber-to-the-home strategy, still pushing aggressively in the New York City metro area but being more opportunistic about where to build fiber in its Western markets, CEO Dennis Mathew told analysts Wednesday as the company discussed Q4 2022 financial results. By year's end, Altice expects to have added 900,000 fiber passings for a total of more than 3 million, which will be more than half of its New York City network and nearly a third of its entire U.S. network, he said. All but 50,000 of those 900,000 fiber passings will be in the East, he said. Altice's Optimum East market competes with Verizon, which is 70% overbuilt in its footprint, and with Frontier, who is also building fiber, Mathew said. Optimum West, meanwhile, is 25% overbuilt, much of that by AT&T and the rest by fiber overbuilders in different pockets, he said. He said Altice has other options in its Optimum West footprint without needing to upgrade to FTTH, including its expanded sales effort, finishing a DOCSIS 3.1 upgrade and continuing its network edge-out. Altice added nearly a million new FTTH passings in 2022, including 251,000 in Q4, Mathew said. Most of those were in the New York City metro area, he said. In 2022, Altice added 200,000 new build passings as it edged out its footprint, with the 2023 goal of at least another 150,000, he said. Mathew also said Altice will focus more on packaging its broadband with its mobile offering being done via its T-Mobile mobile virtual network operator. he said. Altice ended the quarter with 4.3 million residential broadband customers, down 100,000 year over year; 2.4 million residential video customers, down 300,000; and 1.8 million telephony customers, down 241,000. Its Optimum Mobile service had 240,000 lines at year's end, up 54,000 year over year, it said. Revenue for the quarter was $2.37 billion, down 6% year over year.

Breezeline finished construction on a 150-mile fiber network passing more than 1,400 homes and businesses in eastern Virginia, it said Wednesday. The $7.2 million price tag included a $4.2 million Virginia Telecommunication Initiative grant, $1.5 million from Breezeline and $1.5 million from Mathews, Caroline, Lancaster and Middlesex counties, it said.

WideOpenWest extended its footprint to cover Headland, Alabama, north of the Florida panhandle, via a fiber edge-out, it said Wednesday.

The cable industry has been aggressive in Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) deployments, and internet traffic routing is more secure, due to industry and international standards and security practices by major ISPs, cable representatives told FCC Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau Chief Debra Jordan and aide to Commissioner Brendan Carr in separate ex partes, per docket 22-90 Friday. NCTA, Comcast, Charter and Cox said that when measuring the volume of residential broadband traffic on RPKI-valid routes, nearly 60% of U.S. internet traffic terminated at RPKI-protected IP addresses. That's due to ISPs completing RPKI deployments that account for a large percentage of residential broadband internet traffic, and most of this traffic is destined to large content and cloud providers that have also completed RPKI deployments, they said. As well as RPKI for both signing and validating routes, major cable ISPs have taken such routing security steps as prefix filtering, source address validation and use of anti-distributed denial of service attack, they said.

Charter Communications expects to spend $4 billion this year, and the same again in 2024 and in 2025, on extending its wireline network, Chief Financial Officer Jessica Fischer said Friday as the company announced Q4 2022 results. She said appropriation of NTIA broadband equity, access and deployment (BEAD) program funding is expected to arrive in 2024 and will likely come with four-year build timelines from grants. Fischer said the $4 billion annual future spending depends on receiving BEAD and absent that could be lower, and around that time the company's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund spending will start dropping. She said BEAD is "a unique and attractive opportunity" for subsidized network expansion that could generate returns that well exceed Charter's expenses. Fischer said Charter expects to build close to 300,000 rural passings this year, most of which will be paid for via RDOF, atop its normal pace of building. CEO Chris Winfrey said Charter built more than 200,000 rural passings last year, with the expectation that over time its rural efforts will be a significant contributor to customer growth. Fischer said Charter's penetration is typically around 40% six months after new passages were built in rural areas. Per Charter, Q4 revenue was $13.7 billion, up from $13.2 billion the same quarter a year earlier. It ended the quarter with 28.4 million residential internet customers, up more than 250,000 year over year; 14.5 million residential video customers, down 700,000; and 7.7 million landline voice customers, down 900,000. It ended 2022 with 5.3 million mobile lines, up from 3.6 million a year earlier. Charter "really kicked ass in mobile in Q4," with its 615,000 net adds in the quarter "almost as many as AT&T," Recon Analytics’ Roger Entner tweeted.

Some Comcast broadband customers will have access to multi-gig symmetrical speeds later this year through its DOCSIS 4.0 investments, company officials said Thursday as it announced Q4 2022 earnings. CEO Brian Roberts said its broadband network passings were up 1.4% in 2022, with 840,000 additional addresses, and it's aiming to add around a million in 2023, for a total of 62.5 million by year's end. It had revenue of $30.55 billion in Q4. It finished the quarter with 29.8 million residential broadband customers, up slightly year over year from 29.6 million. Residential video customers were 15.6 million, down from 17.5 million a year prior. Residential voice subscribers were 7.9 million, down from 9.1 million. It ended 2022 with 5.3 million wireless lines, up from just under 4 million a year earlier. With its wireless business having 9% penetration of its residential broadband customers, "we have plenty of runway ahead, and we're just getting started in offering wireless to our commercial segment," Roberts said. Peacock ended 2022 with more than 20 million paying subscribers, more than double from the start of the year, Roberts said. He said that was driven by Universal content, sporting events and next-day broadcasting of NBC. He said content launches are expected to drive further growth, with much of that in the back half of 2023. Peacock losses from its spending on new content should peak this year and steadily improve from there, said Chief Financial Officer Mike Cavanagh. Comcast will launch a universal global user interface this year for Sky Glass, Xfinity, X1, Flex and its Charter Communications joint venture Xumo, Roberts said.