Paramount Skydance announced a hostile takeover bid Monday to buy WBD, offering $30 each for all outstanding shares of the company. The move follows the announcement that Netflix struck an $82.7 billion deal last week to purchase WBD (see 2512050046). One analyst said he sees President Donald Trump's heavy involvement in the fight over WBD as an advantage for Paramount over Netflix.
Wireless ISPs continued to weigh in at the FCC last week to oppose major changes to rules for the citizens broadband radio service band (see 2512010052). Questions remain about the future of the band, with some wireless carriers looking at the spectrum for full-powered licensed use, and others urging higher power levels for some operations (see 2511260031).
AT&T became the latest carrier to reassure FCC Chairman Brendan Carr that it's moving away from any trace of diversity, equity and inclusion in its hiring and other practices. Verizon and T-Mobile previously made similar promises to win favor with the FCC and approval of transactions before the agency. Commissioner Anna Gomez warned AT&T that appeasing President Donald Trump's administration carries reputational risks.
Opensignal is deepening its focus on the consumer experience on wireless networks through the recently launched Global Network Excellence Index, said Sylwia Kechiche, the company’s senior director of industry analysis. “We want to explain that network excellence is not all about speed,” Kechiche said Friday during a Mobile World Live podcast. Opensignal uses a metric called “constant quality,” which measures subscriber experience doing “everyday tasks,” she said. “What we want to bring to the table” is an examination of whether “everyone can participate in the digital economy.” Opensignal wants to simulate “what will happen when you do certain things” online.
Recon Analytics is finding that the frequency with which consumers access and use AI is tied to how they get online, analyst Roger Entner said last week during a Fiber Broadband Association webinar. Among consumers who use satellite or DSL, only about 10% use AI on a daily basis, compared to 28% for fixed wireless access, 32% for cable and 45% for fiber, he said.
EchoStar faces litigation from two tower companies over lease agreements from the now-ended nationwide wireless network buildout by its Dish Wireless subsidiary, but few if any other tower company suits are likely, said Ken Schmidt, president of Steel in the Air cell tower lease consultancy. American Tower and Crown Castle represented the vast bulk of Dish's wireless network deployment, and have substantially more to lose than other tower companies, Schmidt added.
Media spending globally on sports rights is expected to top $78 billion in 2030, up from $65 billion this year, Ampere Analysis said Tuesday. Driving that growth will be major renewals in the U.S. and rising competition from streaming platforms taking part in premium live sports rights auctions, it said.
NextNav said a new technical analysis demonstrates that 5G-based 3D positioning, navigation and timing operations can coexist with RAIN systems in the lower 900 MHz band, with “no operational impact … in typical real-world deployments.” For any measurable change to happen, “an implausibly strong 5G signal would need to align with multiple additional simultaneous conditions that rarely align in the real world,” said a filing posted Tuesday in docket 24-240.
The cost of residential broadband plans with speeds of 100-940 Mbps has gone down, on average, 43.1% over the past decade, while plans for 940 Mbps-1Gbps speeds are down 22.5% since 2017, USTelecom said in its latest annual Broadband Pricing Index report. The overall cost of consumer goods and services is up 35.8% during the past decade, it said. Over the past year, the 100-940 Mbps plans saw a price drop of 3.6% on average, while prices for the faster set of plans were down 1.4%.
Charter Communications' proposed acquisition of Cox Communications would mean more gatekeeper power over internet distribution, less competition, higher prices and unequal treatment of underserved communities, according to a petition to deny filed Tuesday (docket 25-233) with the FCC. Petitioners Public Knowledge, the Communications Workers of America, the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society and the Center for Accessible Technology laid out an array of criticisms of the deal, including over plans to cut Cox employees and their prediction of price hikes on consumers enabled by market concentration.