Cable One, Inc.

Cable One, Inc. (NYSE: CABO), which markets residential and business services under the Sparklight brand, is a US broadband communications provider headquartered at 210 E. Earll Drive, Phoenix, Arizona. Founded in 1986, it is publicly traded and is not a subsidiary of a larger parent. Company profiles and financial data providers put headcount at roughly 2,600 employees. Trailing-twelve-month revenue is about $1.5 billion (FY2025 revenue was approximately $1.50 billion); the company has reported net losses in recent fiscal years, and its share price/market capitalization has fallen sharply from prior multi-billion-dollar levels to a small-cap valuation.

Operations. Cable One is an operating cable/broadband company, not a patent holder or shell. It sells subscription-based data, video and voice service to residential and business customers across roughly 20-plus states, with concentration in Arizona, Idaho, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas. Product lines include residential high-speed data (up to ~1 Gbps over hybrid fiber-coaxial, and symmetrical multi-gigabit over shared and dedicated fiber), managed Wi-Fi, Sparklight TV IPTV/cloud DVR, residential video and voice, business data and enterprise Ethernet (dark fiber, E-Line, E-LAN, E-Access), and network-to-network interconnection for wholesale/carrier customers.

Litigation posture. Cable One appears in the database once, solely as a defendant (0 plaintiff cases, 1 defendant case), which is the profile of an operating company being targeted rather than an active enforcer. The single tracked matter, CommWorks Solutions, LLC v. Cable One, Inc. (No. 2:20-cv-00158, E.D. Tex., Judge Rodney Gilstrap, filed May 27, 2020), was brought in the plaintiff-friendly Eastern District of Texas and closed Feb. 12, 2021.

Notable context. The plaintiff, CommWorks Solutions, LLC, is a non-practicing entity and subsidiary of Georgia-based IP Investments Group LLC that acquired its asserted networking patents from Intellectual Ventures. The Cable One suit was one of a batch of CommWorks complaints filed the same day against cable/ISP defendants (including Consolidated Communications), asserting nine patents covering QoS, packet classification, wireless access provisioning and traffic detection against equipment such as Ciena SAOS and Juniper Junos-based gear. Unified Patents has separately challenged CommWorks patents (including an ex parte reexamination of U.S. 6,832,249, asserted here), and the PTAB invalidated another CommWorks patent in Unified Patents v. CommWorks (2023).