New Street’s Jonathan Chaplin Joining Comcast

WASHINGTON, Oct. 3, 2025 – New Street Research’s top U.S. telecom analyst is taking a high-level job at Comcast.

Jonathan Chaplin is joining the cable giant as an executive vice president of strategy and investments in the company’s connectivity and platforms division. He’s been with the research firm since 2012 and, New Street said in a Monday statement, “guided its evolution from a telecom-focused boutique into one of the world’s leading independent research firms covering the entire TMT landscape.”

He’ll be succeeded by David Barden, a longtime telecom analyst who most recently led U.S. and Canada communications research at Bank of America Merril Lynch.

“Over the past decade, we’ve built an incredible team,” Chaplin said in a statement. “With David’s leadership, new relationships, and fresh perspectives, I am confident the team’s best work lies ahead.”

Comcast is reportedly undergoing restructuring, with its three regional divisions being consolidated into one entity next year. The change is expected to lead to layoffs.

The cable operator has been leaning into national subscription plans with price locks and its mobile service, an effort to stave off continued broadband subscriber losses amid competition from the big three carriers’ fixed wireless service. The company counts 8.5 million mobile lines, offered to consumers through a deal with Verizon and small-to-medium businesses through a recent deal with T-Mobile.

The new pricing moves are “a welcome step away from Cable’s familiar (and awful) strategy of big introductory discounts in favor of a much sounder approach of everyday low fair pricing,” MoffettNathanson founder Craig Moffett wrote of the company in July. He’s also been optimistic about the company’s wireless business.

“I am sad to be losing a great colleague, Jonathan Chaplin, who is leaving New Street Research to take a major strategic role at Comcast (an outstanding hire by Comcast and tremendous opportunity for Jonathan), but excited to welcome David Barden,” New Street policy advisor Blair Levin wrote in a LinkedIn post Thursday.

Levin also announced a change. After 11 years as a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, he said he was taking up a similar position with the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“Brookings has been great,” he wrote, “but so is change and I am very excited about interacting with a terrific group on issues that I think are both important for the country and where robust discussion can lead to better outcomes.”