When a carrier sheds its media empire to become a pure internet-and-phone company, that network business stops being a side hustle and becomes the whole show — and for multi-location businesses, that changes what happens at renewal.
By Jonathan Eubanks · July 10, 2026 · 6 min read
⚡ The short version
Two weeks ago I sat down with a client — a regional company running seven locations across Ohio and Indiana — to walk through their Comcast Business renewal. Nothing was broken. The circuits were solid, the phones worked, and the account had been quiet for years. That was the problem.
When we laid the three-year history next to today’s market, the bill had crept up close to 18% while the going rate for the same bandwidth had actually dropped. Nobody had done anything wrong. The service worked, the invoice arrived, autopay paid it, and the price drifted in the one direction prices drift when no one is watching. Then, on June 29, Comcast announced something that makes that drift worth paying real attention to.
Comcast said it will spin off NBCUniversal and Sky — its movie, TV, and streaming empire — into a separate, independent public company. The separation is expected to take about a year. When it’s done, what’s left of Comcast is the network: Xfinity on the consumer side, Comcast Business on ours. It becomes, in plain terms, a pure connectivity and technology company. This comes just months after Comcast already carved its cable-TV networks into a separate business earlier this year.
Here’s the translation for a business owner: the company that carries your internet and your phone lines is about to have nothing else to sell. Connectivity isn’t one division among many anymore — it’s the entire company. And when Wall Street judges you on broadband and business-services growth alone, every renewal on the books starts to matter a lot more.
When the network is the whole business, two things predictably happen. First, the company gets hungrier for new logos — expect sharper introductory pricing and aggressive promos to win market share. If you’re actively shopping, that’s good news for you.
Second, and this is the part that costs businesses money: the renewal is where a connectivity company makes its margin back. Introductory pricing rolls off. The “loyalty” rate quietly lands higher than the new-customer rate. A carrier under pressure to grow revenue leans hardest on the accounts that aren’t paying attention — and Comcast isn’t alone here. AT&T is decommissioning copper, Verizon just got dropped from the Dow, and the whole industry is reorganizing around who owns the pipe. When your vendor is rethinking their entire business, that’s your cue to rethink your side of the deal.
One location, one bill — that’s easy to eyeball. Seven locations means seven contracts, seven renewal dates, and seven chances for the price to creep. Different sites get signed at different times on different terms. Some roll onto month-to-month at a premium. Some auto-renew before anyone opens the notice.
I’ll be straight with you: I have never once reviewed a multi-site account and found every location sitting on its best available rate. Not once. The consolidation happening in the carrier world is really just an argument for consolidating your own view of what you’re actually paying, site by site.
A carrier that’s all-in on connectivity is hungry for connectivity revenue — and that cuts both ways. A hungry carrier negotiates. Its competitors negotiate harder to take the account. That’s a buyer’s market, and the businesses that treat it like one come out ahead. Here’s what that looks like in practice:
The Comcast split isn’t a reason to panic, and it isn’t a reason to rip everything out and switch. It’s a reminder that the company on the other side of your contract is reorganizing its entire business around the exact service you buy — and reorganizations always arrive with a new pricing strategy attached.
Being carrier-neutral means I don’t care whether you stay with Comcast, move to fiber from someone else, or renegotiate and stay put. I care that you’re paying a fair, current rate on terms that don’t quietly bleed you between renewals. Plenty of times the right answer is to stay right where you are — at a better number. And because the carriers pay us, there’s no advisory fee to find that out.
Every few years the telecom industry rearranges itself, and the same pattern holds: the businesses that pay attention save real money, and the ones on autopay quietly fund the reorganization. Comcast betting its whole company on connectivity is the clearest signal in a while that the ground is moving under everyone who buys internet and phone service.
So pull your contracts. Check your dates. Know your number before the renewal notice knows it for you. And if you’d rather someone else did the digging across your locations, that’s exactly the work we do — and we’ll tell you if you’re already on a good deal, because that’s a good day too.
— Jonathan
Jonathan founded Buckeye Telecom in 2003 after years in the Columbus telecom industry — first at 5-Star distributors learning the carrier side, then carrying his own quota in telecom sales. He still works directly with clients — backed by the Buckeye team.
Talk to the Buckeye team — the owner is involved in every engagement, and there’s no advisory fee.
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