AI technology seems to be a hot topic in every industry, and broadband is no exception. It seems inevitable that AI will be used to help monitor and control complex broadband networks. It looks like the biggest ISPs are already phasing AI into the customer service process. Nobody seems to be able to answer the big question of whether AI will change the amount of broadband the average household uses. more
It is becoming clear that the broadband market is reaching maturity. This is already causing havoc in the industry for ISPs that relied on year-over-year customer growth to prop up stock prices. Earlier this year, the New Street Research, a company that specializes in research in the telecommunications and technology sectors, said that it estimated that new broadband customers would grow by about 1 million this year. more
China’s plans for low-Earth orbit Internet service constellations began with two projects, Hongyun (156 satellites) and Hongyan (864 satellites). These were eventually sidelined for Guowang, an ambitious, 12,992 satellite constellation that is expected to begin launching satellites this year. But, that is old news. China’s five-year plan designates satellite Internet as a strategic emerging industry and two new constellations have emerged, G60 (12,000 satellites) and Honghu–3 (10,000 satellites). more
AT&T and satellite company AST SpaceMobile announced a partnership to provide satellite cellular service directly from satellites to cellphones. This will provide a service that is much needed for the billions of remote users who are not in the range of a cell tower. This is an emerging industry that is still being referred to by different acronyms. more
It's almost impossible to talk about broadband at the community level without talking about resiliency and redundancy. It's hard to find rural communities that haven't experienced a broadband outage due to a fiber being cut somewhere. The issue hits the news when there are reports of regional or national broadband outages. more
One of the most common questions I've been asked lately is what I think the impact AI will have on the broadband industry. All of the big ISPs in the industry have actively been pursuing the use of AI. For example, AT&T Labs says it is investigating the use of AI to optimize the customer experience and auto-heal the network. Comcast says that it is using AI to help process petabytes of data every day. more
I recently used Starlink on a cruise along the coast of Northwest Africa, and I'll summarize my experience below, but first let me explain why I put some in the title of this post. I posted the following request on the Reddit Cruise group: "What has been your experience of Starlink Internet service on Seabourn or other cruise lines? How was latency? Do video chats work smoothly? Games? etc." more
The Washington Post recently published an article with a series of graphs showing the impact of the pandemic on various economic indicators, including unemployment, wages, air travel, grocery prices, home prices, and consumer sentiment. The article got me thinking about the impact of the pandemic on the broadband industry, and several important changes emerged from our collective pandemic experience. more
at the end of 2023. LRG compiles most of these numbers from the statistics provided to stockholders, except for Cox and Mediacom - they now combine an estimate for both companies. Leichtman says this group of companies represents 96% of all traditional U.S. cable customers. I suspect there are regular blog readers who wonder why I post these statistics every quarter. more
Today's blog talks about a critical part of the broadband network that most people don't know about -- carrier hotels. These are locations that have been created for the specific purpose of allowing carriers to connect to each other. The need for carrier hotels became apparent in the year after the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. That new law allowed local competition for telephone service. more
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