Recent ILEC acquisitions by Consolidated Communications resulted in improved broadband services, and FairPoint Communications customers likely will see the same, the telcos said in a joint FCC application for change of control posted Wednesday. Their public interest statement said Consolidated/FairPoint will mean new services -- like over-the-top video, security and home automation -- in new markets, and combining their fiber networks will let New Consolidated offer better offer service to multilocation businesses. There are six states in which both operate -- Alabama, Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, Ohio and Pennsylvania -- but none of their territories in those states overlaps, they said. The application listed 20 FairPoint subsidiaries with Communications Act Section 214 licenses that would need to be transferred to Consolidated. Consolidated announced plans earlier this month to acquire FairPoint in an all-stock deal valued at about $1.5 billion (see 1612050030).

The global average internet connection speed rose 21 percent year-over-year in Q3 to 6.3 Mbps, Akamai reported Wednesday. South Korea had the highest average speed at 26.3 Mbps, while Hong Kong had 20.1 Mbps and Norway had 20 Mbps. The U.S. placed No. 12 with an average of 16.3 Mbps. The U.S. average Q3 speed was up 30 percent. The U.K. had the top average mobile connection speed at 23.7 Mbps, while Venezuela had the slowest at 2.2 Mbps. U.S. average mobile speed was 7.5 Mbps. The number of IPv4 addresses connecting to Akamai increased by 0.7 percent from Q2 to 806 million, mostly offsetting a decrease in IPv4 use during that quarter, Akamai said. The report found Belgium remained the “clear global leader” in IPv6 adoption, noting that 39 percent of the country’s connections to Akamai occurred via IPv6. Verizon, AT&T Communications America and Comcast were the ISPs with the largest volumes of Akamai connections using IPv6, the web caching provider said.

Government agencies should partner with tech companies and nonprofits to create online tools connecting low-income people to public and philanthropic programs to which they're eligible, the Progressive Policy Institute said. PPI and Hunger Free America released a report proposing what it called Health, Opportunity and Personal Empowerment (Hope) accounts at a Tuesday event in New York City. “The only thing low-income people have less of than money, is time," Hunger Free America CEO Joel Berg said in a news release. "The new HOPE technology partnership would streamline multiple government and nonprofit safety net programs all into one user-friendly device, allowing low income individuals to fill out one application, rather than wait in line for hours at up multiple government and nonprofit assistance offices.” NYC Department of Social Services Commissioner Steven Banks supported the report at Tuesday’s event, PPI said.

Google agreed with Cuba telecom provider ETECSA (Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba) to deploy the U.S. company's Global Cache service to speed YouTube videos and other high-bandwidth Google content viewed in the country, Google said in a Monday blog post. Cubans with internet access should have reduced latency for cached content, Google said. Engage Cuba, a coalition of companies and local leaders seeking to dismantle the Cuban embargo, sees the announcement as good for local startups. “The deal with Google will allow for increased activity and faster connections that will continue to benefit the Cuban people; in particular, the growing sector of Cuban entrepreneurs, or cuentapropistas, that relies heavily on access to internet to expand their private businesses,” said Engage Cuba President James Williams in a news release.

Comcast doesn't see its broadband subscriber growth slowing in the near future, Chief Financial Officer Mike Cavanagh said at a UBS investor conference Wednesday. Comcast has added a million-plus broadband subscribers annually the past 10 years, and expects to ultimately add about 1.3 million this year, roughly the same as 2015, Cavanagh said, saying it still has big potential markets such as the roughly 6 million DSL homes in its footprint. Asked about the likelihood of the Trump administration undoing FCC Communications Act Title II reclassification of broadband, Cavanagh said opposition to that change was about "the overhang of where it could go" in new regulations. "Hopefully, that chilling effect is gone" with any Title II rollback, he said. Meanwhile, 5G is "plenty of opportunity" for Comcast but also potential threat if there are use cases that impinge on the company's offerings, he said. Cavanagh said penetration of Comcast's X1 video platform is about 45 percent of its footprint and that growth isn't expected to top out soon.

With its entire broadband footprint becoming 1 Gbps-capable by year's end, Mediacom said Wednesday in a news release that makes it the first major U.S. cable company fully transitioning to the DOCSIS 3.1 Gigasphere platform. Mediacom said it sped up its previously announced three-year, $1 billion plan for upgrading its broadband network earlier this year after Gigasphere modems became available. Mediacom said the new minimum entry-level broadband speed for residential customers will be 60 Mbps, with offerings of 100 Mbps and 200 Mbps available, and it will begin offering 500 Mbps and 1 Gbps products market by market in coming weeks.

Altice plans to roll out a fiber-to-home network across most of its territory delivering up to 10 Gbps broadband speeds by 2022, it said in a news release Wednesday. The deployment will start in 2017, reaching all of its Optimum footprint and most of its Suddenlink footprint within five years, it said. The company said the U.S. plans mirror similar fiber deployments in its territories in France and Portugal.

Seven senators are calling on the FCC to take enforcement steps against "harmful zero-rating offerings that violate the principle of the Open Internet Order." In a letter Friday to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, the seven said zero rating can lead to discrimination against competing services and that "When ISPs, not the consumer, choose online winners and losers, the very core tenets of net neutrality could be disrupted." They said it should be considered a violation of net neutrality for an ISP to zero rate its own or unaffiliated content but not that of a competitor, or for it to charge fees to zero-rate content. They said the agency should closely review the effects of zero-rating plans in which ISPs put technical standards on content providers, which can add to transaction costs. The legislators said that while they may not raise "major Open Internet concerns," plans in which ISPs don't require payment from zero-rated applications or favor specific content distributors should still see FCC review. Senators signing the letter are Ed Markey, D-Mass.; Ron Wyden, D-Ore.; Al Franken, D-Minn.; Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.; Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis.; Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.; and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. The agency didn't comment.

Phone companies continue to shed broadband customers, while cable companies continue to add them, Leichtman Research Group said in a news release Thursday. During Q3, the U.S.'s 14 largest cable and telco providers added 625,000 net additional subscribers, roughly the same as added in Q3 2015, LRG said. Cable companies added roughly 775,000 subscribers in Q3, about the same as the year-earlier quarter, it said. Telcos meanwhile lost about 150,000 subscribers, similar to the 145,000 lost in Q3 2015, LRG said, adding that they have had net broadband losses in five of the six most recent quarters. For the first three quarters of 2016, cable added about 2.44 million broadband subscribers, compared with 475,000 lost by telcos, the research firm said.

Google improved its Fiber TV app to allow for watching current streaming episodes of TV programming and recording programming to a DVR, it said in a blog post Tuesday. Google said the app update also now brings personalized recommendations for live TV viewing and for recorded content on the DVR. The app will be updated for Google TV subscribers "in the coming weeks," the company said.