Charter/BHN/TWC Submissions Show Some Video, Broadband Directions

The documents the FCC is poring over in its review of Charter Communications buying Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable give snapshots of everything from interconnection policies to plans of a number of ISPs and cable companies. The released versions of the filings in docket 14-159 -- in response to Media Bureau document requests (see 1510130063) -- are in most cases heavily redacted. However, they illuminate some video and broadband strategic directions and policies.

Buying spectrum and getting into wireless are directions under consideration at Charter. Charter said in its response earlier this month that its wireless strategy could see it "potentially augment Wi-Fi ... by acquiring rights to licensed spectrum." Further elaboration of what Charter said were preliminary plans was redacted. Charter also briefly referenced its "entry by New Charter into the wireless market" and said it plans "with or without the Transaction" to deliver content via the Internet and its Worldbox set-top box. Worldbox will be rolled out to BHN and TWC customers after the deals, Charter said.

Frontier Communications said it "does not apply usage-based pricing" to broadband and doesn't plan to begin metering it. But it said in its submission posted Friday "we continue to monitor the market and continue to consider usage-based offering as an option." The deciding factors range from net neutrality rules and policies of other companies to consumer demand and network capacity, it said. While broadband pricing is a big issue competitively, Frontier said, "the ability to offer video and voice services in tandem ... -- a ‘triple play’ offering -- is a key competitive factor." While it offers its own video product only in a limited part of its footprint, the telco said it may expand that.

Comcast doesn't have any data caps that put a ceiling on the amount available to customers but has launched trials of data usage plans of 300 GB a month in some of its markets, with customers paying additional fees when exceeding that, it said in its submission posted Monday. Meanwhile, its interconnection relationships are "determined primarily by the volume and balance of traffic exchanged between the parties, and whether the parties satisfy" its settlement-free interconnection policy, it said. Companies that don't meet its criteria for settlement-free peering can enter into a direct paid peering relationship or can work through a third-party content delivery network, it said. With the price of transit having fallen 99 percent over the past 15 years and still dropping, that serves to "discipline the prices for direct paid peering relationships," Comcast said.

On its interconnection agreements with ISPs, Cogent said in its submission posted Friday that it and other Internet backbone ISPs, as far as it knows, won't do settlement-free peering with an ISP lacking a high-capacity Internet backbone with multiple connection points in North America and Europe. "There are other considerations ... but the existence of a continent-spanning backbone is the threshold issue," Cogent said. Lacking that, such ISPs are "customers for paid transit," Cogent said, saying it doesn't sell or buy paid peering. An exception to that is an ISP "with significant market power" coming from numerous residential broadband customers in key geographies, it said. Since Cogent has to provide connectivity to those ISP customers to serve Cogent's own business customers, it said it "has agreed to peer with them on a settlement-free basis even though they would not otherwise qualify given the limited scale of their Internet backbones." The company didn't give specifics or examples.

In one of its responses to the data request, TWC earlier this month said it "does not employ any traffic management techniques" that block, limit or throttle Internet traffic or otherwise control performance. The company also said it uses "industry-standard techniques" to find and block malware and protect its network operations.

Comcast's filing also gave a look at its plans for breaking away from the bundle. Among its video experiments, it said, is its Stream online video offering, which will cost $15 a month and let Xfinity Internet subscribers "add a slim cable package and watch live TV from around a dozen networks" on mobile devices without a set-top box.