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Comcast Lowered Cable Investment Despite Net Neutrality Repeal (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Comcast's cable division spent 3 percent less on capital expenditures last year, despite promises that the repeal of net neutrality rules would boost broadband network investment. Comcast's cable division spent $7.95 billion on capital expenditures during calendar year 2017, but that fell to $7.72 billion in the 12 months ending on December 31, 2018. Comcast's overall capital expenditures went up 2.3 percent, from $9.6 billion in 2017 to $9.8 billion in 2018. But that company-wide capital expenditure number includes the Comcast-owned NBCUniversal, which spent $1.7 billion in 2018, a 15.2 percent increase, "primarily reflecting investment at Theme Parks," Comcast said.
The cable capital expenditure statistic thus provides a more accurate picture of whether Comcast increased or decreased investment in its broadband network. Cable capital expenditures as a percentage of Comcast's cable revenue dropped from 15 percent in 2017 to 14 percent in 2018. Comcast's network spending should have risen in 2018 if predictions from Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai and Comcast had been correct. Pai's net neutrality repeal took effect in June 2018. But the vote to repeal net neutrality rules was in December 2017, and Pai claimed in February 2018 that the repeal was already causing increased broadband investment. While Comcast's cable capital expenditures did rise year over year in the fourth quarter, from $2.15 billion to $2.32 billion, it wasn't enough to offset the full-year decline. Ars Technology also notes: "The corporate tax cut implemented as 2018 began also didn't stop job cuts at Comcast and AT&T, despite promises that the tax cut would create new jobs."
The cable capital expenditure statistic thus provides a more accurate picture of whether Comcast increased or decreased investment in its broadband network. Cable capital expenditures as a percentage of Comcast's cable revenue dropped from 15 percent in 2017 to 14 percent in 2018. Comcast's network spending should have risen in 2018 if predictions from Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai and Comcast had been correct. Pai's net neutrality repeal took effect in June 2018. But the vote to repeal net neutrality rules was in December 2017, and Pai claimed in February 2018 that the repeal was already causing increased broadband investment. While Comcast's cable capital expenditures did rise year over year in the fourth quarter, from $2.15 billion to $2.32 billion, it wasn't enough to offset the full-year decline. Ars Technology also notes: "The corporate tax cut implemented as 2018 began also didn't stop job cuts at Comcast and AT&T, despite promises that the tax cut would create new jobs."
Far more difficult, accurate, convenient, and nuanced than hyperbole
Any correlation would be very unlikely to be statistically significant
Yes it does.
When you can throttle your competitors with to recourse you don't need to make the plant better to support rising demand.
"The corporate tax cut implemented as 2018 began also didn't stop job cuts at Comcast and AT&T, despite promises that the tax cut would create new jobs."
Are there still idiots around that believe corporations hire people because they have more cash on hand?
Turns out, with or without Net Neutrality, they wouldn't invest more money either way.
An ISP that stops investing, is an ISP that stagnate and risk losing their place in the market when another ISP shows up and has better stuff to offer. The fact that the FCC believed the drivel from the ISPs (what a surprise from an ISP shill), when they said they would no longer invest if net neutrality stayed, just goes to show how corrupt this government is.
The only reason that cable companies have given for Net Neutrality is that they will increase investment in infrastructure if they have a financial incentive.
when big companies say good things will happen when laws and regulations get changed for their benefit, they're lying.
The problem is that Comcast is has gold metals in mental gymnastics and billing buffoonery.
Without net neutrality, the cable companies become toll collectors. Whoever wants to move the content faster (than everybody else's) will have to pay extra. The best way to incentivize the content providers to pay more is to limit the availability of the bandwidth. The analogy is the toll lane: if there are 10 non toll lanes in each direction and everybody can drive at 75 mph in the morning rush hour, who wants to pay extra to use the toll lane? However if there are only 3 lanes and traffic is bumper to bumper, then it's easier to charge $8.75 for those impatient. With net neutrality, the incentive to the bit pipe owners is to improve overall capacity. Without net neutrality, the incentive is to create some congestion to drive up the toll price.
Except everything I've seen reported so far showed that cable investment went up when net neutrality came in, then went down again after it was repealed. There's correlation.
And there is no incentive when you have a monopoly.
Oh please, for the love of god mod up.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
The current US regimes base only cares that they reduce the brown people coming into the country. As a result there is no need to keep up the lie that companies are struggling because of an equal Internet. The only people that care don't matter to the decision makers. The regimes lackeys will just brush off any negative results of their policies by blaming the Black guy that had the audacity to lead the country, for good and bad, like other presidents before him.
If X is promised in return for Y, then if You is delivered and X isn't, correlation under other circumstances is irrelevant. The fact is, Comcast lied.
Like we all knew they would.
They will suffer no penalties, only customers do that, and it'll get justified by their fanboys.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Thank God I don't have to deal with them anymore. Their cable circuit was at most a backup. It was still broken most of the time.
Corporatism != Free Market
Companies invest when they are optimistic about the future health and potential revenue growth of their organization. Take Amazon, Netflix for example. The majority of Comcast's corporate portfolio are in shrinking industries.
Subtitled "I've just shat myself in surprise!"
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
why would you invest in a dead product?
Agreed. Problem is all the anti-net neutrality people kept saying we had to get rid of it because it stifles investment, and as soon as its gone we'll enter a golden age where everyone has the most super internet access ever.
As with most promises that everything will be fantastic if we just let giant corporations do whatever they like, none of the promised benefits ever appear.
People you haven't wires to aren't"customers". Your logic is flawed. You can't "hurt" a customer you aren't serving.
Here is how it works dipstick. Not only will they cut investment, they will purposefully create dark fibre, fibre that does nothing. This to overload traffic, so unfortunately sic traffic shaping must occur, shame about that and with the traffic shaping comes corporate censorship of everyone and inflated prices. Lobbyist blocking open competition, lies about it being too expensive to run cable, reduced overall bandwidth, forcefully increasing competition for access to services and not the other way round, this to inflate prices and bring in lots and lots and lots of traffic shaping ie corporate controlled censorship, corporate boardrooms deciding what you can and can not say on their internet, even in private conversations. This as a factual conspiracy between the US government, the deep state and the shadow government, they are shutting the internet down, with the backing of M$ and Google and of course a cabal of incumbent telecoms, oh yeah. Really sick stuff, dreamt up by psychopaths to retain power, corrupt as fuck and Pai the shite eating cunt, the number one pathetic quisling, what a fucking worthless lamearse. MS newsguard, yeah, guarding you from the news, keeping the truth from you, guard dogs for the establishment and they have the power to single you out on updates and shut you down.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
You really have to do some mental gymnastics to correlate the the two subjects.
Not if you work in advertising...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
From the report
"For the twelve months ended December 31, 2018, capital expenditures increased 2.3% to $9.8 billion compared to 2017. Cable Communications' capital expenditures decreased 3.0% to $7.7 billion, reflecting decreased spending on customer premise equipment and support capital, partially offset by higher investment in scalable infrastructure and line extensions. For the year, Cable capital expenditures represented 14.0% of Cable revenue compared to 15.0% in 2017. NBCUniversal's capital expenditures increased 15.2% to $1.7 billion in 2018, primarily reflecting investment at Theme Parks."
Ok so cable capex dropped 3% to 7.7 billion. There could be many reasons for the drop, like this article from March 2018 describes:
https://www.fiercevideo.com/ca...
"“For 2018, spending on customer premise equipment is expected to continue to decline. With X1 now deployed to nearly 60% of our residential video base, the pace of our rollout has started to slow,” noted Comcast CFO Michael Cavanaugh during Comcast’s fourth-quarter earnings call in January. "
The real question is how much did Google and Netflix have to invest additionally for their content distribution infrastructure since Comcast didn't have to pay for it themselves under "net neutrality"?
See subject.
Why should they be expected to foot the bill for funding a network that increasingly enables streaming services to compete with them and undermine their profitability?
Except when you lie and pressure the industry so small-time isps can't develop in the area you're not going to deploy to.
It's lies and lies, ready for when they decide to actuall roll out to that area.
Haven't you americans got sick of this yet? Stop complaining and sort your shit out.
Comcast has fanboys?! I mean I've heard of being contrarian but I'm pretty sure the flat earth society has orders of magnitude more numbers in their ranks.
Comcast isn't primarily an internet company, they're a cable company. Wouldn't expect internet rules to overwhelm the effect of their cable capital spending. I suppose it would be too much work to look at Internet companies overall, rather than choosing a single cable company.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Occam's Razor says the simpler explanation is that Cable companies are looking to maximize profits rather than this being a worldwide conspiracy to stop you from downloading furry porn.
What did that have to do with the topic of the article? Nothing. Then why include it? Why, to grind a political ax of course!
fanboys? I think you misspelled Libertarians.
You can't try and micromanage the free market, regulate and grant monopolies and then get upset when the market doesn't work right.
Weird, an industry giant granted special favors and treatment ain't respond to the market correctly? Surely this is how capitalism work
Are you going to force them at gunpoint to create bigger infrastructure? Have the government force them to run their business? That is not capitalism.
Did you expect anything else?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
No, they don't invest because they don't have to invest. They are protected by a natural monopoly, so they don't have to invest.
Tell that to Comcast and Pai. The former claimed it, and the latter swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.
That is not capitalism.
OK. So?
Why downvote this guy. :-)
He speaks the truth.
Go build your own networks.
We did. It's easy and fun
Now each of us is our own private network joined together over a hundred residences.
No one can shut that down.
Everyone runs servers videochat torrent I2P games etc.
And except for each of us covering our own in home hardware and fiber (about $250, once not monthly), it's all completely free forever.
see there's this thing called competition that should be the boot in the ass they need to enhance their infrastructure.
Correct, this is what should happen the market should sort it out however there is no market, these companies have carved themselves monopolies in were they don't compete directly with each other often by forcing municipalities to make rules stating they are the only provider for a given area. Also they don't compete on technology if your lucky you can choose between your phone company (a monopoly) or a cable or DSL provider (another monopoly) so they aren't offering the same speeds which if they were then the market would work and they would be competing on price.
I'm generally for free markets but this has been a disaster, we need to decouple the provider of the data from the infrastructure and ease access to utility poles so more companies can string fiber.
You mean like Ajit Pai did in front of congress?
Seriously, very few companies make products because they have a passion for it. Even if a company was started that way, what business schools teach, loses any of that value derived from making a product out of passion.
Somehow or another, this braindead idea seems to have entered into the schools that teach business: A business is about making money, the actual method of making that money is not terribly important, just the act of making money is important. So a car company is not a car company, it is a company that makes money by building cars.
So here we have a company. Its method of making money revolves around ... who cares what it revolves around? It doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is refining the process to gouge the maximum amount of money out of the service they provide.
So from this vantage point, what do you think Comcast is going to do if they can devise a way to gouge more money out of people? They will do it.
How do you think the Comcast executives sees the infrastructure that provides their method of making money? It is a cost center. Money should come in, never out, so maintenance will always be perpetually underfunded. Money in, no money out.
This is a hyper-refined veiwpoint that has its uses, but to insist that every executive think like this? Absolute madness. Can you imagine how fucked up the world would be if every business acted like this? Oh wait, we don't need to imagine. I don't like this world.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
I wouldn't even say they lied. They uttered some words in response to other words but the meanings of any of those words is not relevant. How can you lie if you did not intend to deceive?
We all know that Comcast is a huge money oriented business. Most of Comcast doesn't even exist to deal with communications and other things that people give them money for. Most of Comcast exists to ensure that the flow of money is the largest that it could possibly be. The services that they provide to get that money to begin with are irrelevant. The only thing that matters is getting more money. It doesn't matter how, why, who, or anything. Money MUST come in. That is all that matters.
Such a sick way to run a business... and I don't mean "sick" the way it used to mean, as in like "cool" or something. I mean sick as in diseased and dying.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Problem is all the anti-net neutrality people kept saying we had to get rid of it because it stifles investment, and as soon as its gone we'll enter a golden age where everyone has the most super internet access ever.
No. The anti-net neutrality people wanted network neutrality gone. They said some words about infrastructure or whatever to try and convince you but those words held no meaning for them then and it is obvious that those words have no meaning for them now. They just wanted impediments to vacuuming up money to be removed. Whatever words they had to utter in order to make it so are irrelevant. I have no idea why anyone "believed" these amoral bloodsucking parasites. We all should know that words hold no meaning for them, just money.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
What do you mean, "No"? You just said the same thing I said?
No, but I would stop giving them billions of dollars of tax payer money and start regulating them as utilities.