The FCC is facing persistent calls from one unsuccessful bidder for Paramount Global to revisit the approval of the company's sale to Skydance Media, but we're told the commission is unlikely to heed them. The agency didn't comment Wednesday.
Broadcasters called for the FCC to save their industry by immediately eliminating the national TV ownership cap in comments filed in docket 17-318 by Monday’s deadline. Meanwhile, MVPD groups, labor unions, public interest groups and conservative entities Newsmax and the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) disputed the FCC’s authority to alter the cap and said doing so would hurt localism, retransmission consent rates and journalism.
Operators of tolling systems won't be affected by NextNav's proposal to reconfigure the 902-928 MHz band to allow a “terrestrial complement” to GPS for positioning, navigation and timing services, according to a study that the company filed at the FCC. It supplements a Brattle Group report that NextNav filed previously (see 2507180034).
Cable One will test a mobile offering in some of its markets starting later this year, CEO Julie Laulis said Thursday. In a call with analysts to announce the company's Q2 financial results, Laulis said it has signed an agreement with a mobile virtual network enabler for the pilot offering. Cable One reported Q2 revenue of $381.1 million, down from $394.5 million during the same three months in 2024. The decline was largely due to fewer video subscribers, it said. The quarter also ended with 932,000 residential data customers, compared with 963,000 in Q2 the year before. Laulis said Cable One isn't expecting to grow its residential broadband customer base this year -- June was the first month in 2025 with year-over-year increases in broadband additions. The company attributed the broadband customer losses to pricing and packaging changes, competition and the end of certain promotions, although that still led to a slight increase in residential broadband revenue over Q1. Cable One's simplified pricing and new marketing are setting the stage for stronger subscriber growth over time, Laulis added. She also noted that about 53% of locations in Cable One's footprint have fiber-to-the-home overbuilding, and fixed wireless "is nearly ubiquitous."
Public interest groups raised concerns about an FCC draft notice of inquiry that proposes changes to how the agency prepares its Telecom Act Section 706 reports to Congress (see 2507170048). Commissioners are set to vote on it at their meeting Thursday. Representatives of Public Knowledge, the National Digital Inclusion Alliance and X-Lab met with an aide to Commissioner Anna Gomez, according to a filing Thursday in docket 25-233.
The National Spectrum Consortium on Thursday released a case study on Peraton Labs' dynamic spectrum management system, which was developed with $18 million in federal support and trialed by DOD. The operational spectrum comprehension, analytics and response (OSCAR) platform “was demonstrated successfully in nearly a dozen DoD field exercises and installed permanently at Fort Huachuca” in Arizona, the case study said. “It has reduced the time spent locating spectrum interference in training operations from hours or days to under ten minutes.”
Comcast, like Charter Communications, saw Q2 continue a trend of broadband subscriber losses. But it also marked Comcast's best quarter ever in mobile subscriber growth, the company said as it announced results Thursday. It said it's starting to see progress from a revamp of its broadband offerings.
Opponents of T-Mobile’s purchase of wireless assets from UScellular, including spectrum, filed a challenge to an FCC bureau order approving the deal (see 2507110045). They asked the agency to review the decision before it closes, which is expected Friday. Commissioner Anna Gomez said in an email she agreed that commissioners should have been asked to vote on the transaction.
International Center for Law & Economics Senior Scholar Eric Fruits on Wednesday criticized a NATE report by the Brattle Group, which found that the U.S. infrastructure market is a “monopsony” dominated by three mobile network operators (see 2507280064). “While the Brattle Group report effectively documents the business challenges some tower contractors face, its diagnosis of monopsony and market failure [is] incorrect,” he said in a post.
Groups and companies urged the FCC to move forward to complete rules for the lower 37 GHz band, including adopting a dynamic spectrum management system (DSMS) based on experience in other shared bands. Reply comments were due Monday and mostly posted Tuesday in docket 24-283. In a 4-0 vote in April, FCC commissioners approved an item aimed at spurring greater use of the 37 GHz band, which the Biden administration had targeted for repurposing (see 2504280032).