CenturyTel and Embarq today announced the completion of their $11.6 billion merger, which results in a phone company that will serve 7.5 million customers in 33 states. The combined company will now be known as CenturyLink — and the aging copper-based DSL lines it offers to most of its subscribers will certainly act as a link to the previous century for customers of the new entity. As part of the FCC approval for the merger, the agency imposed several conditions on the combined company, presumably to ensure that consolidation doesn’t hurt consumers. Continue »

Only 2 percent of the world lives in a country where broadband penetration has exceeded 80 percent, according to a report out today from TeleGeography. The report noted that worries over broadband saturation are really only appropriate in 10 countries out of the 127 the firm tracks, and the U.S. isn’t even one of those saturated markets. There are 36 countries where broadband providers serve less than 5 percent of the population.

So while there’s concern in the U.S. cable and telecommunications industries over growth in their fixed line businesses, what we really should be pondering is whether or not the low-hanging fruit of fixed-broadband access has been plucked, and if so, how do we get broadband to the rest of the world? Continue »

Mushroom's PortaBella device

Good things come in threes, and any triptych of services is the basis for a journalist to declare a trend, so when I met three different companies last week that offered a way to bundle a variety of mobile broadband connections into one fat pipe, I was compelled to pull together an article about them. The idea is not new — Mushroom Networks has been bundling wired broadband services into a fatter pipe for over a year, as has Sharedband, but providing fatter and more resilient mobile broadband by bundling together service from WiMAX, Wi-Fi and 3G providers could gain in prominence as more folks take their computers on the go. However, so far, these services are for corporations or those with fat wallets. Continue »

Eight-two percent of home buyers who have had broadband service over fiber all the way to the house rank it as the leading real estate amenity, the Fiber-to-the-Home Council said today. A national study of U.S. broadband consumers by RVA LLC Market Research and Consulting shows that fiber-to-the-home ranks higher than green spaces, a neighborhood patrol and a community pool when consumers are evaluating planned communities. Continue »

Updated with more service related details : Comcast, the largest U.S. cable company and one of the country’s biggest broadband service providers, says it has started to sell a new wireless broadband service called High-Speed 2go across cities in its cable footprint. Here are some facts:

• Comcast will offer its own wireless laptop cards and the service will not have any voice component. The card is free with a 1 year contract or it can be purchased for $99 and customers can go month to month. If you switch from a phone company, Comcast will waive off the $99 it charges for the card.
• It’s a combination of Clearwire’s WiMAX-based wireless broadband and Sprint’s 3G EVDO data. The nationwide laptop device automatically switches between available 4G and 3G networks. On the 3G service (provided by Sprint) there is a 5 GB amount of data usage included in the plan. The 4G service will follow Clearwire’s terms of service. Continue »

Cablevision today got further blessings from the Supreme Court, which decided not to hear an appeal in the networked DVR-related litigation. We have been following this story pretty closely, and frankly, it is good to see an end to litigation around this technology. Many studios and TV networks such as Paramount, Disney, CBS and NBC are opposed to network DVRs. A network DVR is a way for consumers to record, save and recall their favorite television programs and movies on the remote servers of the cable company. It eliminates the need for owning a local DVR-type device like the ones made by TiVo. Cablevision will launch the service later this summer, including features that would allow you to pause live television when a Cablevision-provided phone rings in your house.

Nokia plans to launch an ARM-based netbook that relies on the Google-pioneered Android mobile operating system in 2010, writes Lazard Capital Markets analyst Daniel Amir in a research note issued this morning. In the same note, he predicts that the total number of netbooks sold worldwide will reach 25 million in 2009 vs. 10 million in 2008, with the majority of them being Intel-based machines running Windows.

Amir said he expects the Nokia notebook to be sold through carriers, which fits with Nokia’s distribution system for mobile phones. From the note:

“In our conversations with ODMs, we have confirmed that Nokia is planning to enter the netbook market with a Google Android, ARM-based netbook that would be sold at carriers. Considering this market is dominated by the PC players, we believe Nokia could face an uphill battle to succeed in this market.”

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