Matt Daneman

Pointing to enterprise traffic increasingly being wireless, Ericsson plans to boost its presence in related cloud-based offerings with buying Vonage for $6.2 billion, announced Monday. Analysts evinced some skepticism about the deal, which Ericsson said should conclude in the first half of 2022.

ViacomCBS streaming audiences are growing rapidly, but so are its streaming content expenses, the company said Thursday, announcing Q3 results. CEO Bob Bakish said streaming content expenses will be double in 2021 what they were in 2020, and continue to grow to $5 billion by 2024. Overall revenue rose 13% year over year, to $6.6 billion. Streaming revenue topped $1 billion in the quarter for the first time, with a 62% increase. Global streaming subscribers exceeded 46 million, adding 4.3 million in the quarter. Chief Financial Officer Naveen Chopra said pay subscriber additions will be higher in Q4, due to demand for Paramount+ content. Bakish said a deal announced with T-Mobile, where every T-Mobile postpaid customer gets a free year of Paramount+ Essential, is part of the strategy of exposing consumers to Paramount+ as its content is ramped up. He said Pluto TV's lunch in Italy last week was part of the that service's international expansion, and Paramount+ will launch next year in the U.K. and Germany and be in 45 markets globally by end of 2022. ViacomCBS stock closed at $35.90, down 4.4%.

Comcast continued a 20-year run adding at least a million residential broadband subscribers a year, though its Q3 2021 adds were slower than Q3 2019, the company said Thursday announcing quarterly results. It added 281,000 residential broadband customers during the quarter, lower than the 359,000 added in Q3 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic. Comcast Cable CEO Dave Watson said growth of lower-income subscribers was slower due to wireless competition drawn by government programs like the emergency broadband benefit and lower churn across broadband providers meaning "less jump balls, where we do well." With Comcast having 1.1 million broadband adds so far this year, it still has a long runway of future connectivity growth, he said. New Street Research's Jonathan Chaplin wrote investors that the softer broadband adds weren't surprising and Wall Street consensus is a further slowdown from the pace of growth in this Q3 is likely. Comcast ended the quarter with 29.4 million residential broadband customers, up 1.6 million year over year, 17.8 million residential video customers, down 1.4 million, and 9.2 million residential voice customers, down 500,000. It has 3.7 million wireless lines, up 1.1 million. Revenue of $30.3 billion was up $4.8 billion. EO Brian Roberts said Comcast sees big potential to gain share in business services with its purchase earlier this month of software-defined networking and cloud platforms company Masergy. It said the 285,000 wireless customers added in Q3 was its best quarter since the 2017 launch of the wireless business. Roberts said the low penetration by its wireless offerings among its broadband customers means its wireless business has room to grow. MoffettNathanson's Craig Moffett wrote in a note that Comcast seems to be pointing to a slowdown in broadband growth in Q4.

U.S. airlines will likely start offering free in-flight connectivity in the next three to five years, which will help drive the satellite aeronautical connectivity market, said SES CEO Steve Collar Wednesday in a company webinar. Data capacity on SES-17, to launch at week's end, is aimed especially at the North American aviation market, he said. He said SES-17 and O3b's forthcoming mPower low earth orbit constellation will be connected, with customers moving from one to the other seamlessly, and that hybridization is SES' first step toward a global interoperable network. Northern Sky Research analyst Brad Grady said 50% of global satellite data capacity demand will likely be from the Americas by 2030, with demand for mobility capacity expected to grow 17-fold, government capacity demand growing 19-fold, and enterprise capacity demand growing 12-fold. Grady said there were 3 Tbps of geostationary satellite capacity and 0.3 Tbps of non-geotatioanry capacity available worldwide in 2020, and that should grow to 32 Tbps of GEO capacity and 140 Tbps of NGSO capacity by 2030.

Video piracy is worsening, with viewers often not aware they're watching pirated content, and some parts of the streaming ecosystem aren't focusing on the problem, experts said Tuesday at a video piracy symposium. Piracy was already a concern when the COVID-19 pandemic set in, resulting in more video consumption and increased piracy, said Steven Hawley, Piracy Monitor managing director.

Wi-Fi 6, now about 2 years old, should start getting wide adoption among ISPs starting by year's end, with it becoming relatively commonplace in households toward Q2, said Patrick Moreno, Zyxel Communications product marketing manager, during a webinar Thursday. He said many providers remain "in the discovery phase" about Wi-Fi 6. He said the latest generation of Wi-Fi has speeds 30% to 40% faster than Wi-Fi 5 and increased capacity for more connected devices, plus lower latency for time-sensitive applications. He said Wi-Fi 6 routers will be backward compatible for Wi-Fi 4 and 5. A variation -- Wi-Fi 6E, which came out earlier this year -- adds the 6 GHz band, which will help alleviate congestion in the crowded 2.4 GHz band and the starting-to-crowd 5 GHz band, Moreno said. He said 6E gateways and extenders are in development.

Many commercial space operators are designing their systems with cybersecurity protection in mind, but "there are still gaps we have to address," said Commerce Department Deputy Secretary Don Graves Wednesday during a Commerce/Department of Homeland Security cybersecurity symposium. Cyberattacks are one of the easiest ways to disrupt or manipulate satellites, and operators need to evaluate their systems using the National Institute of Standards and Technology cybersecurity framework, he said. Bob Kolasky, head of DHS' National Risk Management Center, said federal government action on President Joe Biden's cybersecurity executive order issued earlier this year (see 2105130065) could have a cascading effect on private sector supply chains.

5G remains a theoretical competitive threat to cable, not an actual one, though additional midband and millimeter wave spectrum and new entrants like Dish Network could change that, cable operators and allies said Tuesday at the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo 2021.

The in-flight connectivity market for business aircraft has largely recovered from the pandemic, said Valour Consultancy co-founder and analyst Craig Foster Thursday in a webinar, saying Gogo and Inmarsat are close to resuming installation rates in line with pre-COVID-19 trends. He said it will take a handful of years before new low earth orbit constellations filter through to smaller aircraft as those constellations' initial focus will be on large-cabin jets. He said small and mid-sized aircraft are technological challenges for LEO satellite services, such as creating electronically steered antennas for smaller aircraft. He said in the nearer term, the business aviation market will focus more on L-band service and air-to-ground systems.

Noting underwhelming back-to-school broadband adds, Altice will likely end up with 15,000 to 20,000 net broadband losses in Q3 and broadband subscriber numbers that are flat to slightly up for the year, CEO Dexter Goei said virtually Thursday at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia Conference. He said a new product set and pricing launched early this month should move the company "back to normalized trends and positive net adds" in Q4. Goei said Altice would upgrade 1.5 million homes to fiber by year-end in its footprint where it competes with Verizon. It's also weighing whether to accelerate the timetable for upgrading an additional 1.5 million homes to fiber in that overlap area, and whether other parts of Altice's network should be upgraded. He said the resignation of Chief Operating Officer Hakim Boubazine (see 2109080083) came as operating trends "have been underwhelming the last year or so." Goei's decision to assume Boubazine's duties was designed to bring issues to his attention more quickly, he said. The stock closed down 13% to $22.06.