Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr declared a return to common sense during his ‘Build America’ speech in July. The agenda he outlined for broadband policy included a focus on “outcomes” and “competition as it exists today.” Now, with a merger between Charter Communications and Cox Communications making its way through the approval process, Chairman Carr has the chance to prove it.
Mergers are, after all, an integral part of the broadband industry. Their outcomes can serve consumers well through improved service, cost savings, and a greater foundation for improved innovation and competition as new technology disrupts established cable providers. The FCC would be wise to consider how specific mergers could strengthen competition when deciding whether to approve them.
In high-cost industries, like broadband, mergers are often key to healthy competition. Firms must have infrastructure built out—either wired or wireless—before they can serve their first customer, incurring significant fixed costs. By scaling their business, a firm can shrink that cost relative to their income and put pressure on its competitors. Research finds that mergers and acquisitions serve a key role in making businesses more competitive as they can make them more efficient, and have been a strategy growing in popularity since 2018.
In the Cox-Charter deal, a merger makes sense. Although the two combined companies would boast a winning subscriber count of 37.7 million subscribers, beating Comcast’s 31.9 million in 2024, big is not bad in this case. With a larger economy of scale, the new industry giant plans to pass on its savings and better services to consumers across a wider area. Analysis shows that for a 500 Mbps plan (more than double the national average internet speed), Cox subscribers paying $80 today could switch and pay $30 less per month for a year without any speed reduction. That’s an extra $360 back into consumer wallets each year. For a 1,000 Mbps plan, the total savings are even larger: $480 per year. While critics may argue these promotions are simply companies making empty promises, a 2013 study shows that post-merger prices fall in competitive markets.
In the competitive broadband industry, mergers have already proven to benefit consumers. For example, the FCC allowed T-Mobile to acquire Sprint in 2020, despite many critics warning of consumer harms and job losses. However, post-merger analysis found that by combining its network and spectrum shares with Sprint’s, T-Mobile was able to bring its real wireline prices down and offer broader coverage and service, which attracted new customers. In fact, total subscriber ship jumped 8.4 million in 2022. Perhaps most notable, the merger set the stage for T-Mobile to expand into the broadband space with fixed wireless access technology, putting competitive pressure on incumbent cable providers.
Competition is still pressuring broadband providers to pass their savings on to consumers—and not absorb them into corporate profits. Research finds that since 2022, fixed wireless access subscriber count soared by 400 percent, forcing cable providers like Comcast, which lost 226,000 subscribers in the second quarter of 2025, to keep prices low and offer price-lock promotions to win back customers. This fierce competition is reflected in current net profit margin averages for US broadband, which hovers around 7 percent. That’s hardly evidence of monopolistic price gouging and suggests that even with large, nationwide providers, savings are passed on to the consumer.
Taking all this into account, it’s clear that the Cox-Charter deal could generate new cost savings through greater economies of scale. Pressure from wireless and satellite can ensure the new cable superpower would pass those savings on to consumers, as Charter claims it will. Market forces are at work, pushing consolidation in a high-cost industry to strengthen competition. Approving the Cox-Charter merger is an excellent opportunity to prove the FCC has returned to common-sense policymaking and considers real-world market conditions.
Nate Karren is a policy analyst with the American Consumer Institute, a nonprofit education and research organization. For more information about the Institute, follow us on X @ConsumerPal.