Matt Daneman

Its $1.4 billion purchase of Sprint's Boost Mobile complete, Dish Network is now in the retail wireless marketplace, it said Wednesday. It said it would keep the Boost brand, and reinstituted a shrinking payments plan. It said its "$hrink-It!" plan starts at $45 a month for 15 GB and goes down by $5 after three on-time payments and another $5 after six on-time payments. It said Boost's previous shrinking payments offering ended in July 2014.

MVPDs and subscribers shouldn't expect rebates from programmers due to the lack of live sports content, sports and cable experts said in interviews last week. At least one cable ISP indicated it expects a rebate or discount, and multiple ones have brought up the issue with programmers. The idea of sports costs is also getting political pressure.

Facing what the New York Attorney General's Office told us is an inquiry into Charter Communications' labor practices and management of employees during the pandemic, the company emailed us Wednesday that it has been "dramatically" reducing the number of workers going into the field or office "while maintaining the efficacy of our business operations." It said most office and call center workers are remote, it announced a permanent $1.50 an hour pay increase to field operations and customer service employees retroactive to their annual increase in February, and committed to a $20 hourly minimum wage in 2022. It said it has given every worker an additional 15 days of COVID-19-related flex time and promised no furloughs or layoffs for at least 60 days. The cable operator said it instructed employees to follow Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendations for quarantining if sick, with full pay and benefits. The company said many workers at its corporate campuses are on a rotating schedule to allow for minimal interaction and social distancing, and it escalated routine cleanings in line with CDC guidelines. Other cablers and other ISPs are taking similar moves, we have found (see 2004100038).

Streaming video providers are slowing video transmissions to free up bandwidth when U.S. ISP networks are jammed, we heard this and last week. More content providers likely dialed back their HD video quality during the pandemic, said Streaming Video Alliance Executive Director Jason Thibeault. An FCC official doesn't anticipate requesting streaming video operators throttle bit rates like Europe has (see 2003240032). For our past report about increasing demand on networks, see here. (It's in front of our pay wall, like other coronavirus coverage). Google said that after last month defaulting all YouTube videos to SD to ensure maximum bandwidth availability in Europe for 30 days, it expanded that action globally. It said users can manually adjust quality. It has seen changes in usage patterns from more people at home, expanding across additional hours. Netflix didn't comment Tuesday. By March 31, average home monthly usage in the U.S. was around 400 GB, up around 20% from the end of 2019, said OpenVault CEO Mark Trudeau. Extrapolations point to this month ending with 450-460 GB, or a year's worth of usage growth in a few weeks, he said: Most gains are in the daytime hours, which had ample headroom. Sandvine told us some outlier networks worldwide flatlined, needing no further extra capacity. It said edge providers have reduced their part in congestion, with Sony's PlayStation and Microsoft's Xbox cutting speeds. Traffic on fixed broadband infrastructure networks is up 20-100%, it said. The biggest jump was in daytime hours; while peak used to be evening to midnight, it now starts at around 10 a.m. and goes daylong. There have been some consumer complaints and data that slows in some areas and network performance has suffered at certain times. "End-user uplink speeds are being detrimentally impacted," emailed Penn State X-Lab Director Sascha Meinrath. He said the FCC definition of broadband as 25/3 Mbps is "severely asymmetrical." Upstream data use is up heavily due to HD telepresence, so heavier Netflix use isn't a challenge, but "it's the Zoom classrooms and meetings (and soon, telehealth diagnostics) that are going to cause major headaches," he said. Increased buffering might not reflect so much network congestion as the speeds subscribers signed up for, said OpenVault's Trudeau: With everyone home, "they need a bigger pipe going into their house."

OneWeb's Chapter 11 filing could result in fundraising challenges for other broadband non-geostationary orbit constellation plans, NGSO experts told us. Some said Monday it could stoke doubts about the mega-constellation-delivered broadband business model. The company said it's using bankruptcy as a way to buy time until global markets rebound from the COVID-19 slowdown so it can then sell itself. From the beginning, the company "was like a big science project" lacking an established business case about how to make money bringing satellite-delivered connectivity to populations that are typically poor, said satellite consultant Hany Eldeib. As long as OneWeb founder Greg Wyler was able to sell investors like SoftBank on the idea, "everybody was kind of, 'OK, we'll go along,'" Eldeib said. Eldeib said mega constellations like SpaceX and Amazon's Kuiper could be more insulated because they have the backing of billionaires, though OneWeb's bankruptcy could make it harder to attract outside investment. He said more-limited low earth orbit connectivity constellations like Telesat serving a niche could have a better chance. OneWeb was rumored to have financing problems before COVID-19, and the pandemic "is a massive issue for the space startup community [as] venture capital has run for the hills," said Greg Autry, University of Southern California business professor. For NGSO broadband constellation business plans, it's "a perfect storm" because the virus is hammering airlines and other industries that were considered likely customers of that connectivity, he said. Kuiper and SpaceX are likely to come to fruition given respective owners Jeff Bezos' and Elon Musk's financial strength, Autry said. He said if the U.S. doesn't become an NGSO anchor tenant, Chinese companies offering a Chinese version of internet access could become the norm for developing nations. The U.S. offering unrestricted and uncensored internet connectivity globally might make "a great U.S. soft power play," he said. Satellite consultant Tim Farrar said OneWeb's bankruptcy is going to mean renewed questions about the size of the satellite broadband market. He said SpaceX could face big questions about financing since it fell short earlier this month in fundraising efforts. SpaceX didn't comment. OneWeb's petition Friday with U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan is here, (in Pacer, docket 20-22437). OneWeb had expected that over 2020, it would do monthly launches to complete its 648-satellite constellation.

The FCC has been pleased to see industry take-up of its "keep Americans connected" pledge and its push to expand low-income offerings, and doesn't anticipate asking edge providers to throttle their streaming video quality to ensure adequate data network capacity, said Evan Swarztrauber, an aide to Chairman Ajit Pai, in a Recon Analytics web conference Tuesday. The European Union asked streaming services like Netflix and YouTube to reduce their data traffic. Deploying 5G could face some COVID-19 headwinds due to the workforce issues getting antennas installed, Techsponential President Avi Greengart said.

Regulatory reviews of mergers and acquisitions aren't expected to face major COVID-19-related slowdowns despite FTC suspension of early terminations (see 2003130075) or DOJ Antitrust Division announcing it will seek extra time to complete its review work and leaving the door open to extending that timeline further, experts told us. Few deals necessitate second information requests by DOJ and that extra time won't materially change how transactions play out, said Holland & Knight antitrust lawyer David Kully, former chief of the DOJ radio and TV M&A section.

StarLink will focus on the 3% to 4% of people who are hard to reach by telcos, instead of competing with them, said SpaceX CEO Elon Musk Monday at Satellite 2020. He said satellite broadband is a vastly bigger revenue possibility for the company than its launch business. He said there's no plan to separate the StarLink business from SpaceX and the focus is "not going bankrupt." Growing low earth orbit broadband investment has driven some ground equipment mergers and acquisitions over the past year. The next big wave will be satellite operator-related consolidation, maybe in the form of operators buying operators or buying other parts of the supply chain, said Quilty Analytics Senior Vice President-Investment Banking Justin Cadman.

Tentative plans by DOJ's Antitrust Division and the FTC not to challenge a vertical transaction if the parties have a share of less than 20% of a relevant market raised several red flags in comments submitted last week. The agencies got several recommendations that we received earlier (see 2002270043). We asked both Wednesday for all the submissions, and received a link from the FTC. Last week, we had filed a Freedom of Information Act request for them, which we are seeking on Monday to withdraw.

Charter Communications will offer 5G mobile service this quarter, said CEO Tom Rutledge on a Q4 call Friday. It's "likely to participate" in the upcoming citizens band radio service spectrum auction, he said. Asked whether Charter would ever move to its own wireless network instead of relying at least partly on a mobile virtual network operator, Rutledge said it depends on pricing. He said it has no immediate plans to change its Verizon MVNO relationship, and anticipates it existing "for years to come." Rutledge said 10G investments will be done incrementally over time, and won't require an immediate network overhaul, saying Charter surpassed 10G capabilities in lab testing. Q4 revenue of $11.8 billion rose 4.7 percent year over year. It ended 2019 with 24.9 million residential broadband customers, up 5.4 percent, 15.6 million video customers, down 3 percent, and 9.4 million voice customers, down 6.8 percent. It has 1.08 million mobile lines, compared with 134,000. The stock closed up 5 percent to $517.46.