STAMFORD, Conn.—In a move that will improve the user experience for broadband applications like gaming, video chats, AI tools, Charter’s Spectrum operating brand has announced the rollout of ultra-low latency internet services powered by L4S technology (low latency, low loss, scalable throughput) in select markets, with a national rollout to follow.

“Speed gets you there, but latency determines how it feels once you arrive,” said Danny Bowman, executive vice president, product at Spectrum. “Many of today’s most popular applications require real-time responsiveness. This is about eliminating delays so customers can enjoy gaming, working or connecting with family via video in a way that feels immediate.”

The company explained that L4S technology enables smoother, more responsive connections for latency-sensitive applications including AI tools, gaming and video chatting. Spectrum’s low-latency network works with products from companies like NVIDIA and any other developers who build their applications to meet L4S standards. When both the product and network are optimized, the customer experience is improved.

Automatically included with Spectrum Internet service at no additional cost, low latency technology is already live for Spectrum customers in the Dallas–Fort Worth, Texas; Reno, Nev.; Rochester, Minn.; and St. Louis, Mo. areas.

The service will expand to additional markets across the country as the company completes its ongoing network evolution project, bringing enhanced connectivity to customers nationwide.

More information about Spectrum Internet is available at Spectrum.com/Internet.

For decades, live sports were the last stronghold of traditional linear television. That’s no longer true. More people in the United States now watch live sports via streaming than through linear TV: 114 million in 2025 compared to 82 million on linear TV. Just three years earlier, traditional TV still led by double-digit margins. By 2027, the gap between streaming and linear TV is expected to climb 62%.

To consumers, the shift seems seamless: the same game, the same commentary, even the same screen. But behind that smooth experience lies enormous technical complexity. For internet service providers (ISPs), every major sporting event now means a surge of unpredictable demand that tests the very limits of their networks.

What ISPs Are Saying
Netskrt’s State of the ISP Industry Survey set out to quantify what many in the broadband world already suspected: Live sports are stressing networks more than any other content category. Consider:

• 78% of ISP respondents said sports cause them the most concern when it comes to streaming reliability, far ahead of major video game drops at 20%.
• Nearly 75% reported that network traffic spikes by as much as 200% during major sporting events, amplifying the risk of congestion and buffering.
• More than half cited traffic congestion and buffering as their top technical worries during live streams, and one in three named buffering alone as their primary issue.

In other words, the excitement of a championship match looks very different from an ISP’s vantage point. When hundreds of thousands of households in a region all tune in at once, local nodes can be overwhelmed within seconds.

Why It Matters to Content Providers
For streaming platforms, winning sports rights is a major coup. Exclusive live games attract subscribers, increase engagement, and command premium ad rates. But every new contract also brings new operational responsibility.

When a stream falters, viewers rarely blame their ISP. They blame the streaming platform. A single high-profile outage can trigger social backlash and subscriber churn. That’s why content owners entering or expanding their live sports presence need to think beyond rights acquisition and video production. They must consider how their distribution strategies affect the downstream networks that ultimately deliver the experience to fans.

Today’s delivery ecosystem is interconnected: Streamers, cloud providers, CDNs, and ISPs all share accountability for Quality of Experience (QoE). Yet many of those relationships remain siloed. ISPs have little visibility into the event-specific demands about to hit their infrastructure, and content owners have limited insight into last-mile conditions.

What Content Providers Should Consider
Survey respondents made clear that the problem is not just capacity but coordination. Even well-provisioned networks struggle when traffic patterns change abruptly. A more collaborative approach between content providers and ISPs, supported by their content-delivery partners, is essential.

As live streaming becomes the centerpiece of sports distribution, content owners should apply the same diligence to delivery that they apply to content acquisition. Key questions to ask when evaluating CDN or infrastructure partners include:

• Are they purpose-built for video? Many legacy CDNs were designed for general web content and struggle with the low-latency demands of live streams. Platforms need partners engineered specifically for high-bitrate, real-time video.
• Do they have deep visibility into ISP networks? CDNs that integrate closely with ISPs can pre-position content and steer traffic intelligently, reducing last-mile congestion.
• Can they scale dynamically? Elastic capacity and real-time traffic management are critical when audience size can triple in minutes.

A Shared Responsibility for a Shared Audience
The migration of live sports to streaming is irreversible and still accelerating. For ISPs, it’s a technical and financial challenge. For content providers, it’s an opportunity tempered by risk.

The only sustainable path forward is partnership: clear communication among streamers, CDNs, and ISPs; smarter use of data; and investment in delivery architectures built for volatility.

Live sports have always united fans across regions. Delivering them flawlessly in the streaming era will require that same spirit of teamwork behind the scenes.

LONDON—Numerous Canadian video service providers have selected Friend MTS and its Dynamic Delivery Server Blocking (DDSB) solution to prevent piracy, the company said this week.

Forming an industry-first collaboration, these organizations have secured a nationwide court order to dynamically block access to any servers hosting broadcasters’ pirated content, including content from major sports leagues, such as FIFA, NBA, NHL and UFC, it said.

The court order allows Internet Service Providers to block access dynamically to servers attempting to distribute pirated content without requiring a new court order for each sporting event. This approach will save money and time in protecting content and billions of dollars in associated content rights, it said.

Friend MTS developed DDSB in 2017. It delivers large scale blocking of content while meeting strict legal standards required for court orders blocking servers. The solution gives users the intelligence and evidence needed to persuade ISPs to restrict access to illicit services, thereby cutting the number of illegal streams, it said.

As a result, viewers are encouraged to watch content from legitimate commercial sites, maintaining the value of the content, it said.

“This collaboration shows the powerful impact that results from video service providers, ISPs and video security specialists coming together to fight piracy,” said Shane McCarthy, CEO, Friend MTS. “Canadian operators are leading the global industry by setting the bar for piracy prevention in new, dynamic ways. We’re thrilled to have helped them not only implement security solutions but to obtain the blocking order as well. Our unique blend of expertise and blocking technology innovation is aiding their security teams, legal counsels, and business leaders with the right analytics and evidence to effectively stop piracy, without impacting legitimate websites.”

More information is available on the company’s website.

DÜSSELDORF—Green Streams has announced a new collaboration with Varnish Software to build a powerful CDN for its end-to-end IPTV & OTT platform.

Integrating Varnish Enterprise will ensure fast, reliable and secure video distribution for Green Stream’s platform, which helps ISPs rapidly roll out new TV and Entertainment offerings that they can bundle with broadband to retain and attract customers, the companies said. 

"Customers of TV and entertainment services worldwide have extremely high demands on the stability and quality of streaming. They expect smooth streams with the highest resolution, as they know it from Netflix, Amazon and Co.," explains Gernot Jaeger, CEO and co-founder of Green Streams. "Varnish Enterprise enables such high-quality user experiences in interaction with our own technology platform and is therefore an important addition to our platform."

To ensure fast, reliable and secure video distribution for Green Streams’ platform, the two organizations have collaborated to offer a self-operated Content Delivery Network (CDN) based on Varnish Enterprise’s powerful caching capabilities.

The partnership is designed to help ISPs overcome the complexities and costs of creating bundles of broadband and entertainment offerings. 

Green Streams’ robust Platform as a Service (PaaS) simplifies this process, enabling content providers to easily introduce outstanding streaming-based TV and entertainment products without great risk or upfront costs. To bolster the core of its platform, which was developed 100% in-house, Green Streams has integrated industry-leading third-party solutions, including Varnish Enterprise  Private CDN  for caching, as well as other modules including analytics, personalized video recommendations and more, the companies said. 

Varnish Software was chosen because Green Streams needed a solution that was not only powerful, but also flexible and easy to manage. With its central management and numerous modules, Varnish Enterprise meets these requirements perfectly, enabling Green Streams to effortlessly implement necessary functions like geoblocking, URL signing and the ability to define very granular rules for content distribution. Additionally, Varnish Enterprise is deployable on-premises – a must for ISPs who often need to seamlessly integrate Green Stream’s solution with their own infrastructure.

Varnish Enterprise can be deployed easily via a remote agent that does not require physical access to servers. Therefore, the private CDN can be quickly extended into customer environments and scaled effortlessly and dynamically to enable Green Streams to easily expand its CDN infrastructure in the future.

Since implementing Varnish Enterprise, Green Streams now requires only about half as many servers as originally calculated, which has massively reduced costs and administrative efforts. The performance capacities are used so efficiently that the company can serve more users with the same hardware - at the highest streaming quality. In addition, Varnish Software distributes the content intelligently within the CDN so that the cache hit rate is very high and the load on the content providers' original servers remains extremely low.

"It is impressive how efficiently Varnish Enterprise uses server resources and with how few systems we can serve high performance requirements," adds Ivo Stock, CTO and co-founder of Green Streams. "We haven't been able to get close to maxing out the performance so far, and we haven't been able to push our platform to its performance limit even with various load tests."

PHILADELPHIA —A number of internet service providers and broadband providers, including Comcast and Cox Media Group, have announced plans to help ensure connectivity for users during the coronavirus pandemic that is keeping many people home.

Comcast’s plan is offering new, low-income Internet Essentials customers two months of free internet and increased speed, as well as making Xfinity Wi-Fi hotspots across the U.S. free for use by anyone, including non-Xfinity internet subscribers. In addition, Comcast is pausing its data plans so that all customers can use unlimited data for no additional charge, while also eliminating the threat of disconnect or late fees to customers who contact Comcast about difficulty paying bills during this period; flexible payment options will be available. Other resources will include educational collections accessible for X1 customers by saying “education” into an X1 or Flex voice remote, and 24/7 network support.

All of these services will be offered for the next 60 days.

Cox, meanwhile, has announced it has activated its Business Continuity Plan designed for pandemic situations. This will ensure the continuation of services and establish ongoing communications as circumstances evolve, says Cox. Cox also says it has available gig speeds to help people who now may be working from home, as well as a low-income broadband program. It will also explore ways to expand initiatives as a result of school closings.

Other ISPs and broadband providers have been adapting their offerings to meet needs amid the coronavirus pandemic. For instance, AT&T last week signed FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s Keep Americans Connected Pledge and is offering video-conferencing and conference call services to businesses and schools.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) has also praised the efforts of ISPs for ensuring broadband connections.

“The coronavirus outbreak is already creating an unprecedented need for teleworking, telehealth and online education technology,” said Warner. “I’m glad to see certain companies quickly responding to our letter and putting a pause on restrictive caps, fees and other policies that could interfere with online access during this critical time. I’m also pleased to see companies committing to expanding broadband access for students who may not have it so that their educations are not completely disrupted during school closures. I call on those internet providers that have not taken similar steps to do so immediately, in order to assist their fellow Americans during this time of great national strain.”

A new report from Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts shows that U.S. wireless carriers are throttling online video traffic “24/7,” with AT&T and T-Mobile the biggest offenders. The claims come a little more than a year after the FCC’s repeal of net neutrality rules—that were designed to avoid such instances—went into effect.

Based on 650,000 tests from early 2018 to early 2019, the researchers found that AT&T throttled Netflix 70% of the time and Youtube 74% of the time. AT&T left Amazon’s Prime Video alone, however. T-Mobile U.S. throttled Amazon Prime 51% of the time but left Skype alone.

“They are doing it all the time, 24/7 and it’s not based on networks being overloaded,” David Choffnes, associate professor at Northeastern University, and one of the authors of the report, told Bloomberg.

[Read more: The Battle Over Net Neutrality]

The FCC repealed net neutrality rules in December 2017. At the time, critics warned that a repeal could lead to ISPs downgrading internet speeds that could favor their own content, a concern frequently raised in the AT&T-Time Warner merger. Attorneys General in 22 states have filed a protective petition for review against the FCC in the U.S. District Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia.

AT&T denied the claims.

“We don’t throttle, discriminate or degrade network performance based on content,” said AT&T spokesman Jim Greer in a statement. “We offer customers choice, including speeds and features to manage their data.”

FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, a proponent of net neutrality, issued a stern warning about what could happen when the commission voted to repeal the rules in 2017.

“As a result of today’s misguided action, our broadband providers will get extraordinary new power from this agency,” Rosenworcel said at the time. “They will have the power to block websites, throttle services, and censor online content. They will have the right to discriminate and favor the internet traffic of those companies with whom they have pay-for-play arrangements and the right to consign all others to a slow and bumpy road.”