The cable industry's distributed access architecture deployment cycle -- with DAA deployments enabling DOCSIS 3.1 upgrades and eventually a DOCSIS 4.0 rollout -- is still in its early days, with most of the upgrade work likely to happen between 2024 and 2027, Dell'Oro Group's Jeff Heynen blogged Friday. Comcast and Cox today account for 38% of the DAA node or module market, but purchases by Charter and other cable operators will also drive significant equipment purchases, he said.

While Altice continues to lose broadband subscribers, that rate of decline from quarter to quarter is slowing and could stabilize in 2024, CEO Dennis Mathew said Wednesday afternoon in a call with analysts as Altice announced Q3 results. He said Altice’s East footprint fiber customers all have 8 Gbps symmetrical speeds available, and the company is expanding 8 Gbps symmetrical availability. He said the company ended the quarter with 91% of its West footprint upgraded to DOCSIS 3.1, and 1 Gbps is available to more than 95% of its overall footprint. In addition, Altice is simplifying its broadband speed tiers, and as part of that is retiring a number of low-end speed tiers, said Mathew. The company said Q3 marked Altice's third straight quarter of mobile line growth acceleration, ending Q3 with 4.2 million residential broadband customers, down 100,000 year over year; 2.2 million video subs, down 250,000; 1.6 million telephony subs, down 250,000; and 288,000 mobile lines, up 52,000. Revenues were $2.3 billion for the quarter, down $77 million year over year. Asked about the traditional pay-TV video marketplace, Mathew called it “broken” as consumers increasingly shift from linear to streaming, but linear costs continue to rise.

Charter Communications' carriage deal struck with Disney last month (see 2309110034) is a road map that can point to broadband benefits for other cable operators and is potentially a way of retaining broadband subscribers in the face of fiber overbuild and fixed wireless competition, Dell'Oro Group Jeff Heynen blogged Monday. The spectrum and bandwidth freed up for Charter in the deal means more bandwidth available for broadband subs, he said. That bandwidth reclamation could be significant for cable operators that never deployed switched digital video, he said. As more video viewers switch to over-the-top services, cable operators are increasingly moving to a role as content aggregators as a means of trying to ensure those nonlinear video subs remain broadband customers, he said.

Shentel is buying Ohio-based fiber network operator Horizon in a $385 million cash and stock deal, the cable operator said Tuesday night. Shentel CEO Christopher French said the Horizon deal lets Shentel accelerate its fiber strategy, doubling the size of its commercial fiber business and creating new opportunities for its Glo Fiber business. Shentel said the deal is expected to close in the first half of 2024, pending regulatory approvals.

Eighty-five percent of Americans are bullish on their residential broadband service, NCTA blogged Monday, citing a Morning Consult survey it commissioned. It said when asked about download speeds, signal strength, cost, security and reliability, big majorities of respondents were satisfied. It said the survey of 2,208 adults was done Aug. 18-21.

Cable operators have been trying to confuse local governments about their obligations, and the FCC hasn't addressed the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' 2021 decision on the agency's 2019 local cable franchise authority order (see 2105260035), localities told Commissioners Anna Gomez and Geoffrey Starks, per a docket 22-69 filing Friday. The NATOA, National League of Cities, U.S. Conference of Mayors and National Association of Counties representatives urged the FCC to implement the court ruling that cable operators charging local governments for franchise obligations need to do so at marginal costs and clarify that local governments should be required to pay the marginal cost of only their use of institutional data networks and not for cable system deployment to serve small businesses and other nonresidential consumers that use institutional networks. The localities also urged repeal of the FCC's mixed use rule, saying the 6th Circuit "found it does not correctly state the law." The localities also said they backed the agency's pending digital discrimination proposals and said local elected officials should have better means for updating the national broadband map to use it to monitor the state of digital discrimination.

Comcast will launch a variety of symmetrical speed broadband tiers in Colorado Springs next week in its first residential rollout of its DOCSIS 4.0 network upgrades, it said Thursday. It said it will offer 300 Mbps, 500 Mbps, 1 Gbps and 2 Gbps symmetrical speed services there. It said the DOCSIS 4.0 rollout will expand to Philadelphia and Atlanta before year's end.

WideOpenWest is expanding its fiber network into Minnesota, with construction to begin in Anoka and Ramsey counties in coming months, it said Tuesday. It said it expects to pass 85,000 homes in Minnesota, and is expanding the number of total homes to be passed as part of its current Greenfield expansion initiative to 345,000. The expansion is part of the company's overall goal of reaching 400,000 additional homes by 2027.

Cable ISP Vyve Broadband closed on its purchases of the commercial arm of Georgia's ATC Broadband and Oklahoma's Community Cable and Broadband, it said this week. Vyve said the ATC deal strengthens its presence in east-central Georgia. It said it plans a network upgrade for CCB to allow faster internet speeds.

Breezeline's Stream TV platform, available in seven states, is expanding to the cable company's Maryland, Virginia and Delaware markets, it said Wednesday. A company spokesperson told us it expects to introduce Stream TV in South Carolina in October, making it available in all Breezeline markets. The company is gradually migrating subscribers of its video legacy service to the cloud-based Stream TV platform, while new video subs are all on Stream TV, he said.