Top U.S. phone companies lost 226,257 broadband subscribers in Q3, more net losses than in any quarter except Q2 2016, reported Leichtman Research Group Tuesday. Leading cable companies added 830,000, 114 percent of the net add in the year-ago quarter. AT&T was the telco loss leader, dropping 123,000 subscribers, followed by 71,000 losses at Frontier, 36,000 from CenturyLink and 7,000 leaving Verizon. Windstream, TDS and Consolidated gained 11,143 total. All cable companies had subscriber growth, led by Charter with 380,000, followed by Comcast (379,000), Cox (25,000) and Altice (14,900). Total broadband subs among the firms with 96 percent of the market, were 100.5 million; cable had 67 percent.

"Whoa, it worked!!," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted Tuesday, one of a pair of tweets he said he made via the company's Starlink low earth orbit satellite constellation. The company said it expects its second batch of Starlink satellites to be launched by month's end.

Cable's planned 10G needs significant upgrades for 10 Gbps, since that downstream data path requires 1.3 GHz -- more capacity than most cable networks, CCG Consulting President Doug Dawson blogged Thursday. Cable systems must upgrade to 2 GHz to 3 GHz for acceptable upload data streams and for video programming, he said. They likely will replace most if not all amplifiers and power taps in the outside coaxial cable network and some older coax, he said. Faster speeds require upgrading headends and DOCSIS modems.

Verance landed adoption of its ATSC 3.0-specified Aspect watermarking for HbbTV’s “application discovery over broadband” platform, said the technology supplier Tuesday. The move will “facilitate” interoperability and give manufacturers and programmers “global scale and cost efficiencies,” said Verance.

Liberty Global's Virgin Media launched 1 Gbps in the U.K., after its Telenet launched similar speeds earlier this month in parts of Belgium, and UPC Switzerland doing likewise across its footprint, it said Monday. Liberty Global did 15 "GigaCity" deployments in Slovakia and Poland earlier this year, it said. It said it will do more GigaCity launches now through 2020.

Google’s plan to “implement encrypted Domain Name System lookups into its Chrome browser and Android operating system” could massively interfere with “critical internet functions,” telecom groups wrote Congress Thursday. NCTA, CTIA and USTelecom signed the letters to the Commerce, Judiciary and Homeland Security committees in both chambers. Google plans to implement the change through “a new protocol for wireline and wireless service, known as DNS over HTTPS (DoH),” they wrote. “If not coordinated with others in the internet ecosystem, this could interfere on a mass scale with critical internet functions, as well as raise data competition issues.” Google didn’t comment.

Gogo said mobile broadband operations introduced in 900 MHz mustn't cause harmful interference to air-to-ground radiotelephone service (ATG) in the adjacent 894-896 MHz. The FCC is looking at reconfiguring the 900 MHz band to allow broadband (see 1907030028). “Gogo’s engineering analysis shows that even a single mobile broadband device transmitting in the 900 MHz band within one kilometer of a Gogo base station can cause adjacent band interference with ATG base station receivers,” it filed, posted Thursday in docket 17-200: “This interference will either reduce the receive range of Gogo’s base stations or the capacity of ATG links.” The company urged protecting ATG with safeguards proposed for adjacent licensees in 901-902, 930-931 and 940-941 MHz.

Hughes and Facebook are partnering on setting up Wi-Fi hot spots in Colombia employing a Hughes VSAT and Facebook's Express Wi-Fi software platform, Hughes said Wednesday. It said the service is aimed at service providers and integrators wanting to monetize their own hot spots, particularly in unserved or underserved areas. It said its customers have set up more than 32,000 satellite-based community Wi-Fi hot spots in Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico and Russia.

Qualcomm is demonstrating four new networking platforms at its Wi-Fi 6 event in San Francisco designed for densely congested networks, onboarding of hundreds of devices without degradation of user experience, and high performance, it said Tuesday. The platforms leverage all the elements of Qualcomm’s Wi-Fi 6 feature implementation but differ by format, scale of application and computing profile. Netgear's Orbi Wi-Fi 6 Mesh system, based on Qualcomm Wi-Fi 6 technology, delivers “significantly enhanced capacity, coverage and simultaneous multi-user performance” via dedicated tri-band support with quad stream radios for all the three Wi-Fi bands, said David Henry, Netgear senior vice president-connected home product.

Altice, Charter and Comcast should have residential broadband market share gains, said Wells Fargo's Jennifer Fritzsche in a series of notes to investors Tuesday. Charter, adding such share in recent years, is expected to continue gaining from legacy telco competitors with slower speeds. The analyst expects video subscriber declines in excess of 500,000 in Charter's FY 2019 and 2020, accompanied by more customers moving into higher-speed broadband tiers. She said Altice's fiber-to-the-home strategy "should 'future-proof' its network" via higher-speed tiers and lowering future operating and capital costs: Its residential broadband revenue growth has come from pricing, and growth can likely be sustained by featuring its speed offerings in Suddenlink markets where it often competes with DSL-based telcos. Fritzsche wrote that Comcast, with roughly 26 percent of the U.S. residential broadband market, should get further gains from network and customer experience investments.