From USA Today, "Altice Group, a European telecom company controlled by French cable entrepreneur Patrick Drahi, has agreed to buy U.S. cable operator Cablevision (CVC) in a deal valued at $17.7 billion."

Altice already is buying smaller cableco Suddenlink for $9B. That makes for a big stake in the US market.

Charter is buying Bright House and TWC to become the number 2 sized cableco.

Meanwhile Comcast -- who tried to buy TWC -- is making big waves in the business sector. They announced, "Comcast Business Announces New Unit Targeting Fortune 1000 Enterprises" (on a page with pop-ads?!)

Comcast already has a good sized chunk of the small business market. They already are a top 10 Metro Ethernet player. And they have a large share of the Hosted PBX market. Now they turn they whale towards the Enterprise, where, quite frankly, the competition is fierce. Level3, Windstream, AT&T, Verizon and CenturyLink already compete heavily in that space. It will be interesting to see what happens next. Typically, that space buys the logo. No one every got fired for buying IBM or paying way too much for Verizon.

According to research firm TNS, Cable Large-Business Market Share Climbs to 17%. ""The rollout of advanced voice services by cable providers over the past few years has afforded them the opportunity to make significant progress at the high-end of the market," TNS VP Frank Perazzini was quoted as saying." [telecompetitor]

CLECs used to own this market space. Now they are weakly competing with cable on this space. Tough to compete with a $300 cable-voice bundle.

CLECs now chase multi-location deals. Cable has a hard time with that because of the territory structure. How will Comcast's Enterprise move affect that? Or the Charter consolidation? What will CLECs do next? (Move to the Cloud?)