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.

Wall Street wasn't enamored with Charter Communications' plans for $5.5 billion in network investments over the next three years, with Charter shares closing Wednesday at $328.34, down 16.4%, after a Tuesday investor presentation following that day's market close at which it unveiled the spending plan. New CEO Chris Winfrey (see 2209210008) said the spending would give it a network of 2 Gbps/1 Gbps speeds and capacity using DOCSIS 4.0 technology of 10 Gbps. In the context of Charter's overall size "and what we get for [the spending], we think it's worth it," Winfrey said. He said Charter will expand its Spectrum Mobile 1 Gbps offering across more of its footprint. He said Charter sees big growth opportunities in selling converged mobile and wireline service, with only 3 million subscribers today taking that although its network passes 55 million locations. Video’s problem has been affordability, and the Charter/Comcast joint venture Xumo will let Charter sell streaming video packages and applications, aggregate consumer streaming applications, and deploy a lower-cost IP set-top box, Winfrey said.

Big milestones in 10G technology development this year such as reaching 9 Gbps downstream and 6 Gbps upstream capacity with DOCSIS 4.0 technology "support the key tenets of 10G," CableLabs said Tuesday. Other notable steps toward 10G include Comcast's testing of a 10G modem prototype (see 2201130053) and its announcement it will roll out symmetrical multigig speeds next year (see 2209200048), CableLabs said.