Charter Communications expects to spend $4 billion this year, and the same again in 2024 and in 2025, on extending its wireline network, Chief Financial Officer Jessica Fischer said Friday as the company announced Q4 2022 results. She said appropriation of NTIA broadband equity, access and deployment (BEAD) program funding is expected to arrive in 2024 and will likely come with four-year build timelines from grants. Fischer said the $4 billion annual future spending depends on receiving BEAD and absent that could be lower, and around that time the company's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund spending will start dropping. She said BEAD is "a unique and attractive opportunity" for subsidized network expansion that could generate returns that well exceed Charter's expenses. Fischer said Charter expects to build close to 300,000 rural passings this year, most of which will be paid for via RDOF, atop its normal pace of building. CEO Chris Winfrey said Charter built more than 200,000 rural passings last year, with the expectation that over time its rural efforts will be a significant contributor to customer growth. Fischer said Charter's penetration is typically around 40% six months after new passages were built in rural areas. Per Charter, Q4 revenue was $13.7 billion, up from $13.2 billion the same quarter a year earlier. It ended the quarter with 28.4 million residential internet customers, up more than 250,000 year over year; 14.5 million residential video customers, down 700,000; and 7.7 million landline voice customers, down 900,000. It ended 2022 with 5.3 million mobile lines, up from 3.6 million a year earlier. Charter "really kicked ass in mobile in Q4," with its 615,000 net adds in the quarter "almost as many as AT&T," Recon Analytics’ Roger Entner tweeted.

The cable industry has been aggressive in Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) deployments, and internet traffic routing is more secure, due to industry and international standards and security practices by major ISPs, cable representatives told FCC Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau Chief Debra Jordan and aide to Commissioner Brendan Carr in separate ex partes, per docket 22-90 Friday. NCTA, Comcast, Charter and Cox said that when measuring the volume of residential broadband traffic on RPKI-valid routes, nearly 60% of U.S. internet traffic terminated at RPKI-protected IP addresses. That's due to ISPs completing RPKI deployments that account for a large percentage of residential broadband internet traffic, and most of this traffic is destined to large content and cloud providers that have also completed RPKI deployments, they said. As well as RPKI for both signing and validating routes, major cable ISPs have taken such routing security steps as prefix filtering, source address validation and use of anti-distributed denial of service attack, they said.

Some Comcast broadband customers will have access to multi-gig symmetrical speeds later this year through its DOCSIS 4.0 investments, company officials said Thursday as it announced Q4 2022 earnings. CEO Brian Roberts said its broadband network passings were up 1.4% in 2022, with 840,000 additional addresses, and it's aiming to add around a million in 2023, for a total of 62.5 million by year's end. It had revenue of $30.55 billion in Q4. It finished the quarter with 29.8 million residential broadband customers, up slightly year over year from 29.6 million. Residential video customers were 15.6 million, down from 17.5 million a year prior. Residential voice subscribers were 7.9 million, down from 9.1 million. It ended 2022 with 5.3 million wireless lines, up from just under 4 million a year earlier. With its wireless business having 9% penetration of its residential broadband customers, "we have plenty of runway ahead, and we're just getting started in offering wireless to our commercial segment," Roberts said. Peacock ended 2022 with more than 20 million paying subscribers, more than double from the start of the year, Roberts said. He said that was driven by Universal content, sporting events and next-day broadcasting of NBC. He said content launches are expected to drive further growth, with much of that in the back half of 2023. Peacock losses from its spending on new content should peak this year and steadily improve from there, said Chief Financial Officer Mike Cavanagh. Comcast will launch a universal global user interface this year for Sky Glass, Xfinity, X1, Flex and its Charter Communications joint venture Xumo, Roberts said.

Cox Communications should drop advertising that implies internet from competing providers is glitchy and unreliable, unlike Cox's, the Better Business Bureau's National Advertising Division said Thursday. It said AT&T challenged the ads, and the implied message wasn't supported. NAD said Cox disagreed with the finding but indicated it will "take NAD’s recommendations into consideration in its future advertising.”

Among those aware of the cable industry's 10G high-speed broadband initiative, 94% back the idea, particularly because of the speeds it will deliver, NCTA blogged Tuesday, citing a poll it did in late 2022 with Morning Consult. It said 88% of survey respondents indicated they were satisfied with their broadband. NCTA said 79% of tech-savvy adults surveyed said they will likely subscribe to a faster internet speed within the next 12 months.

Cable operators filing FCC Form 1240 can adjust the non-external portion of their rates by 4.37% in Q3 to account for inflation, per a notice in Monday's Daily Digest.

Cox Communications unveiled its own mobile service, Cox Mobile, Thursday. It said it's available to Cox internet subscribers and features two data plans.

Wired broadband -- meaning anything over 200/200 Kbps -- is available to 93.7% of residential units in the U.S., or probably around 120 million occupied housing units, MoffettNathanson wrote investors Wednesday, citing FCC broadband map data. With an estimated 104.9 million residential wired broadband subscriptions in the U.S. in Q2, that means a penetration of 87.4% into broadband-available homes, it said. That penetration rate seems to point to cable broadband being largely saturated and its growth likely to flatline going forward, it said. Due to poverty, illiteracy and lack of relevance among homes not subscribing, that saturation rate could be close to a ceiling, it said. Cable operators are likely to be particularly aggressive bidders in NTIA's broadband equity, access, and deployment program, it said.

Pointing toward looming 10G cable broadband deployment, NCTA blogged Tuesday that FCC data shows cable ISPs have a history "of deploying their fastest services ubiquitously to communities they serve regardless of income level or race." It said the new FCC broadband map shows that as of June, cable providers are offering gigabit-level service to 96% of locations they serve. It said there's "virtually no difference" in gigabit-level availability based on the racial composition or household income of a given area.

The competitive threats to cable's broadband business are overstated, and cable's wireless growth opportunities remain undervalued, MoffettNathanson's Craig Moffett wrote investors Monday. Rather than market share loss, the big driver of the recent slowdown in cable broadband net adds is likely due to market saturation, he said. Rather than the recent competition from fixed wireless, the big longer-term competitive threat to cable is from fiber, he said. Labor shortages and rising installation costs will moderate some fiber overbuilding, he said. Pessimism about the profitability of cable-offered wireless service ignores the opportunity cable has via offloading data traffic onto its own network, he said. Offloading onto Wi-fi "is but a warm-up for the coming main event, which is offload on CBRS small cells," he said.