With AT&T’s arrival in the Mexican wireless marketplace with its purchase of Iusacell and Nextel, América Móvil is responding with plans to build a new state-of-the-art $50 billion fiber-to-the-home network for Mexican consumers.

According to El Economista, América Móvil has a five-year plan to construct a 311,000 mile fiber network that will offer phone, broadband, and television service. The move comes in response to media reports AT&T is exploring delivering a video package over its acquired wireless networks within the next two years. The network will support broadband speeds that are faster than what most Americans along the border with Mexico can receive from AT&T and CenturyLink’s prevalent DSL services.

In comparison, U.S. phone companies like Verizon have stopped expanding its FiOS fiber to the home network and AT&T largely relies on a less-capable hybrid fiber/copper network for its U-verse service.

Competition in Mexico has forced providers to upgrade their networks to compete for customers while those in the United States tend to match each other’s prices or advocate for industry consolidation to maximize revenue and keep their costs as low as possible.

América Móvil’s broadband service Infinitum Telmex has already attracted 22.3 million broadband customers — a number likely to rise once it can enhance its online video streaming service Clarovideo.

Hong Kong Telecom Group (HKT) chief technical officer Paul Berriman believes copper phone wiring is a thing of the past and is nonplussed by efforts to wring a few more years of life out of infrastructure that cannot reliably support high-speed Internet and is costly to maintain. The only solution that makes sense is to get rid of the copper and replace it with fiber optic wiring.

While America talks about 1Gbps limited rollouts, he is thinking about speeds ten times faster with his announcement Hong Kong Telecom is preparing to launch 10 gigabit service across the territory and was continuing its efforts to tear out obsolete copper wiring.

The man partly responsible for ensuring Hong Kong’s broadband future is a fast and reliable one says HKT has 1.6 million broadband customers — 530,000 on fiber to the home service and 200,000 on less-desirable VDSL2 with vectoring, which still relies in part on copper wiring. He is not happy with copper wiring’s performance and support costs and wants it out of his network. His minimum target speed is 100Mbps and if he finds a building that for any reason does not deliver more than 30Mbps at all times, he instructs engineers to immediately tear out the copper and replace it with fiber.

Berriman

Overall, Hong Kong has an average Internet speed of 87 megabits per second, according to figures by Akamai. “Our (HKT) average is about 116Mbps,” he said. It is about to get much faster. The two major wired fiber competitors are HKT and HKBN and both compete fiercely for broadband customers.

HKT has three tiers of unlimited use fiber broadband (regular prices shown in U.S. dollars, prices lower for certain bundles and promotions):

• 300/300Mbps for $64.21/mo;
• 500/500Mbps for $77.10/mo;
• 1000/1000Mbps for $90/mo.

When the 10Gbps upgrade is complete, HKT is likely to further boost speeds and/or cut prices.

Berriman acknowledges that the densely packed multi-dwelling apartments and condos common across Hong Kong makes large fiber projects less expensive than elsewhere in the world, but believes costs can be managed by deploying incremental upgrades. For example, HKT today has fiber extending into 85 percent of Hong Kong’s buildings and can connect fiber to 79 percent of homes in Hong Kong within three days of receiving an order.

Depending on a customer’s requirements, HKT can save money by serving DSL over short lengths of existing in-building copper wiring for customers not subscribed to ultra-fast broadband speed tiers. The length of wiring is short enough to guarantee speed is not affected for these customers. When customers do need the fastest speeds, fiber is strung directly to their apartment. Despite this, HKT is progressively migrating away from “fiber to the basement” to an all-fiber network to simplify its facilities and increase reliability, especially as the demand for faster speeds continues to grow.

“Once we get to 50 or 60 percent usage of the fiber in the building we start to look at converting the rest to get rid of the [older DSL] electronics,” Berriman said.

HKT also operates a mobile network it acquired from “Sunday” in 2006 and has also bought out Telstra’s share of the formerly joint owned CSL. The wireless company has a 31 percent market share and 4.6 million customers on two different networks — one supplied by ZTE and the other from Huawei. To supplement its wireless mobile network and offload traffic, HKT also operates 14,000 Wi-Fi hotspots across Hong Kong and is a leader in the use of EAP-SIM, which makes it easy for connections to be handed off between its mobile and Wi-Fi networks without interruption.

Malone

The Economist reports Charter Communications’ acquisition of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks has been structured so that “it should pay no tax for several years, at least.”

The merger deal, which intimately involves John Malone, the boss of Liberty Media — a cable and media conglomerate, has all the hallmarks of a classic Malone-inspired deal: complex ownership structures, high debt levels, assiduous tax planning and a refusal to overpay.

Unlike many other dealmakers, Malone seems to want to avoid the spotlight. His firm Liberty Media is Charter’s biggest single investor and will kick in at least $5 billion in Charter stock purchases to help consummate the transaction, which will be handled primarily by Charter’s management.

The deal comes at Malone’s insistence the American cable landscape must be consolidated into just 2-3 large companies. For now, he is content standing aside while the public faces of the merger are Charter’s CEO Thomas Rutledge and Time Warner Cable’s Rob Marcus. (Bright House Networks is also a part of the transaction but has been completely overshadowed by its larger deal partners.)

While coverage of the transaction has been relegated to the Business section of newspapers and has evoked shrugs from American reporters, The Economist calls it nothing short of an extraordinary landmark.

“The boss of Liberty, a cable and media conglomerate, he has struck more deals than perhaps any other tycoon in the world—buying and selling hundreds of firms worth over $100 billion since the 1970s, often negotiating on his own, using calculations that fit on a napkin,” said the publication. “Unusually for an empire-builder he has made his investors a ton of money, and has little interest in the public eye.”

While Malone is hardly a household name, he could soon be at the center of the sixth largest corporate takeover in U.S. history and make him the world’s unparalleled media baron, controlling an empire three times the size of Rupert Murdoch’s media ventures. While Comcast will remain America’s largest single cable operator, Malone’s Liberty Media will dwarf Comcast globally with more than 75 million cable customers around the world.

Malone does not share the concerns of some Time Warner Cable and Charter investors that the merger will generate a “staggering” $66 billion in debt from day one, initially loaned from Wall Street investment banks. The Economist notes Malone seems to be violating his own rule to never overpay in a deal. In the British financial press, Charter’s deal for Time Warner Cable and Bright House does not pass Malone’s own smell test.

“At 9.1 times gross operating profits he is paying at least a fifth more for TWC than he typically does,” says the newspaper. “He is offering 23% more for it than Comcast did in its bid last year, which was scuppered by antitrust regulators. Based on last year’s cash-flow figures the deal will make a pitiful 5.6% return on capital, assuming no tax is paid. Like most cable firms TWC has a stagnant top line, with growing broadband sales being offset by declining TV and telephony revenues. So fast growth will not bail out Mr Malone.”

So where does The Economist believe John Malone will make his killing? From captive customers and suppliers, of course.

“The most obvious explanation is that Mr. Malone thinks the world has not changed much since the 1990s and that the cable industry remains a collection of local monopolies from which ever more juicy profits can be squeezed,” says The Economist. “America’s cable firms have poor service and high prices: the average Charter customer pays at least 50% more per month than one of Mr Malone’s customers in Britain or the Netherlands. In Europe cable firms face tough competition in broadband from telecoms operators; in America the telecoms firms have rolled out fixed-line broadband to perhaps just half of homes or fewer.”

The Economist suspects Malone’s new cable empire will follow Europe and be less dependent on flogging costly bundles of unwanted television channels to reluctant punters. Instead, it’s all about broadband and the platform it represents to obtain a range of video services that replace traditional cable television. But Malone’s future vision almost certainly includes a wireless mobile component, which means Americans should not be surprised to see the tycoon attempt to acquire a large mobile company, even one as large as AT&T, on which he can sell video and other telecom services. That is precisely what he is doing today in Europe.

After serving just two years as the chief financial officer of Time Warner Cable, Arthur Minson today left the cable company to become president and chief operating officer of WeWork, a shared office space provider.

Time Warner Cable isn’t announcing a permanent replacement. Instead, William F. Osbourn, Jr., who now serves as senior vice president-controller and chief accounting officer, and Matthew Siegel, who currently serves as senior vice president and treasurer, will serve as acting co-CFOs.

Last year Minson made $13 million, after receiving an effective 137% raise over 2013. He reportedly has $1,826,915 in awarded Time Warner Cable stock and option awards worth $1,767,619. If Comcast had successfully purchased Time Warner Cable, Minson would have walked away with a $27 million golden parachute. Charter has not yet disclosed what it intends to pay Time Warner Cable executives in exit bonuses.

Not for long

Although Hulu Plus ($7.99/mo) has managed to attract a claimed nine million active subscribers, it has never drawn as much attention as its rivals Netflix and Amazon, and Hulu’s CEO believes that is because consumers, including his mom, are confused about the difference between Hulu and Hulu Plus.

Hulu is the advertiser-supported free side of Hulu and Hulu Plus offers a deeper catalog of content (and the right to view it on mobile devices) in return for a monthly fee. But the premium side of Hulu has always been plagued with complaints it collects money from customers and still forces them to watch paid advertising.

“Even when I was a subscriber, Hulu Plus didn’t make much sense,” said Scott Beggs of FilmSchoolRejects. “You signed up, gave them your credit card information, scored an account, and the commercials were still there. Shame on all of us who assumed that paying eight bucks a month would let us avoid watching the same heartburn medication commercials five times per Daily Show episode, I guess.”

In late April, Hulu CEO Mike Hopkins said the company was moving away from the Hulu Plus brand and that it will gradually disappear from the website over the summer. But for now, it remains uncertain if only the Hulu Plus name will disappear or if Hulu will shift to an entirely free or all-paid service. With Hulu working on an advanced video ad-targeting platform, it seems unlikely advertising will go away completely.

For many that continue to reject Hulu Plus, it comes down to one issue: commercials.

“The only thing that will bring me back would be the removal of all advertising,” says Les Wilder. “I could put up an antenna and view all the shows I want for a lot cheaper than paying Hulu, if I wanted to watch the ads that go with over the air broadcasting.”

Although Hopkins said 2015 would be a breakout year for Hulu, its audience share continues to decline.

As of the third quarter of 2014, Netflix remains the runaway winner with a 36% household penetration score. Amazon Prime Access is now in 13% of American homes, while Hulu Plus is a distant third at just 6.5% penetration.