Click to Skip Ad
Closing in...

Comcast just got a major ego boost from the FCC

Published Jan 30th, 2015 6:00PM EST
Comcast Broadband

If you buy through a BGR link, we may earn an affiliate commission, helping support our expert product labs.

On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission voted in favor of a new standard for broadband Internet. From now on, anything less than 25Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream is no longer considered broadband — but there has been one unexpected (and perhaps unwanted) victor as result.

As of January 29th, Comcast’s broadband market share is now greater than 50%.

READ MORE: Comcast is sorry it called customer an ‘a**hole’ on their bill

According to a Comcast filing from December 2014 regarding the upcoming Time Warner Cable merger, the provider noted that it would control “56.8 percent [market share] excluding mobile broadband and 44.7 percent including mobile broadband,” reports Ars Technica.

So how does Comcast already have a 50% market share on broadband without TWC? Here’s the kicker: “Comcast’s national share [will] only increase by one percent due to the transaction under this definition of broadband.” In other words, the TWC merger won’t have any significant impact on the provider’s broadband market share.

It’s worth noting that Comcast is basing its numbers on an FCC report from December 2013, but it’s clear that regardless of the exact percentage, Comcast got a huge boost from this decision.

Worst of all, it’s even given Comcast another argument in favor of the highly contentious TWC merger:

“[T]he salient fact is that even at the most extreme speed threshold of 25Mbps, the transaction has no material impact on competition: The combined company’s broadband share would increase by only 1 percent.”

Jacob Siegal
Jacob Siegal Associate Editor

Jacob Siegal is Associate Editor at BGR, having joined the news team in 2013. He has over a decade of professional writing and editing experience, and helps to lead our technology and entertainment product launch and movie release coverage.