Welcome to today's broadband and cable news roundup.
If Dish Network Corp. (Nasdaq: DISH) and Sprint Nextel Corp. (NYSE: S) are indeed talking about forging a mobile partnership, they sure aren't acting like pals-in-the-making. On Monday, Dish criticized Sprint for asking the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to take additional steps to ensure that Dish's Advanced Wireless Services (AWS)-4 spectrum won't interfere with the H-block, which Sprint is eyeing for its Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks. Dish has agreed to surrender 5MHz (2000MHz to 2005MHz) of its 20MHz of AWS-4 spectrum as a guard band. "Sprint's strident opposition to Dish's proposal is merely another merely another transparent attempt by the incumbent, Sprint, to block a new entrant from competing in the marketplace," Dish argued in the ex parte filing. The FCC will vote on the matter on Wednesday. (See Sprint Eyes Dish Partnership and Dish's Wireless Plans Could Get 'Crippled'.)
Cablevision Systems Corp. (NYSE: CVC) intends to wrap up first-round bids for its cable properties in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and Utah by the end of the week, with Charter Communications Inc. expected to be among those submitting offers, reports Bloomberg. Charter's interest in the former Bresnan Communications systems, which serve about 360,000 subs, has been rumored for weeks. An industry source told Light Reading Cable last week that Charter was indeed doing diligence on the Bresnan properties, which Cablevision now refers to as Optimum West. Charter CEO Tom Rutledge is, of course, already familiar with those systems, as he was the COO of Cablevision when it bought Bresnan in 2010 for $1.36 billion. (See Cablevision Considers Bresnan Offers and Cablevision Goes Country With Bresnan Buy.)
It does sound a little bit like that, and other than for the incumbnets in KC, it's really an empty threat. But it will be interesting to see how TW Cable & AT&T react as Google Fiber services get deployed a bit more broadly in 2013. JB
I haven't had a chance to read the full analysis , so i don't know how they arrived at that number and if it indeed included rural areas. If anything, the report would seem to eliminate any fears that Google Fiber might start steamrolling in other markets, which quite honestly is not really the expecation....but interesting that someone took a stab at affixing a possible dollar figure to the idea of a national(ish?) rollout.
Google's never admited as much, but I continue to hear that they are really doing this to light a fire under the cable guys (and maybe the telcos too) to add broadband speed and capacity quicker than they have been. That possibility was raised even when Google launched the project way back when but it's come up again in my discussions. Guess I'd be surprised if they expand this project outside of the KC area...depends on how the economics shake out. But I still find their approach interesting. JB
$140B should be no surprise. Maybe even lowball. It cost VZ $23B to cover 80% of its (reduced) footprint, mostly in cherry picked communities, with existing COs, engineering records, duct, pole attachments, aerial strand to overlash, workforce and vehicles. Google or their contractors would have to replicate that. Assuming "nationwide" truly means "nationwide", they would have to cover hard-to-serve urban areas and expensive-to-serve sparse rural areas.
I'd speculate that the Google Fiber experiment has turned out to be a real eye-opener for Google. And I'd be surprised if the conclusion is not that they should stick to their knitting and leave infrastructure to folks who do infrastructure.
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