Cable One Down 10.9k Subs, Shentel Up 5.4k
Tower company SBA Communications said it had also sued Dish for failing to pay rent after spectrum sales.
WASHINGTON, Feb. 27, 2026 – Cable One lost 10,900 broadband subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2025, more than analysts had expected but an improvement over the previous quarter.
Cable One CFO Todd Koetje said that was largely due to total disconnects improving “significantly” from the third quarter, when net losses hit 21,300.
“As a result, net subscriber results in the fourth quarter improved relative to the declining trends we experienced earlier in 2025, though net subscriber figures remained negative,” he said on the company’s earnings call Thursday. “We continue to operate in a challenging macro environment with competitive pressure from fixed wireless and fiber overbuilds.”
He noted that fixed wireless was available essentially everywhere in the company’s 2.9 million-location footprint, and that 60 percent of that footprint faced competition from fiber or another cable provider. Cable companies across the board have been losing subscribers in recent quarters, and Cable One, along with others, has been offering lower prices and bundling mobile service to fix the problem.
That will likely be the playbook of new CEO Jim Holanda, MoffettNathanson founder Craig Moffett wrote in an investor note. Holanda previously led cable operator Astound Broadband for 15 years.
“It’s a safe bet that Jim’s action plan will start with the broadband value proposition. Bundling with mobile will be a big part of that value proposition, but lower standalone prices will likely be a part of it as well,” he wrote. “Cost reduction initiatives to fund more aggressive consumer pricing are likely.”
Moffett wrote that would put pressure on the company’s average revenue per user (ARPU), but was probably necessary to stave off losses. He wrote Cable One’s relatively low penetration rate, 34.5 percent, gave the company room to grow.
Cable One counted 999,100 total broadband subscribers at the end of 2025. The company has been piloting a mobile service, which Holanda said would be fully launched soon.
Shentel
Shenandoah Telecommunications Company (Shentel) added 5,385 broadband subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2025, the company reported Thursday. The large majority of those, 5,323, came in its Glo Fiber expansion markets.
The company kept its incumbent footprint subscribers roughly flat at about 112,000, adding just 62. Shentel’s earnings presentation disclosed that 21 percent of its 252,000 incumbent passings were fiber, with the rest being cable. That buildout is being funded by state and federal grants.
Shentel ended the year with 426,800 expansion market fiber passings, nearly 88,000 of which have signed up for broadband service. The company deployed nearly 26,500 new Glo Fiber passings in the fourth quarter, and nearly 64,000 in 2025.
The company is planning to complete that build, with a target of 510,000 passings, by the end of 2026. With the end of the build out on the horizon, Shentel is laying off about 10 percent of its 1,041-person workforce.
SBA Communications
Tower company SBA Communications executives said on its Thursday earnings call that it had added itself to the list of infrastructure providers suing Dish Wireless.
Dish’s position is that its parent company EchoStar was forced by the Federal Communications Commission to reach multibillion-dollar deals to sell much of its spectrum, leaving Dish unable to operate its wireless network through no fault of its own. That leaves Dish free from its lease obligations in its view, something tower companies are not happy about.
SBA, which owns more than 17,000 towers in the U.S. said Dish owed it about $56 million annually and had stopped paying rent in December.
“We’re going to go after enforcing our rights under the agreement the best we can,” SBA CEO Brendan Cavanagh said. “We’ll see where it all shakes out.”
Asked if SBA would start tearing down Dish gear, Cavanagh said “you don’t know what we’re doing and what we’re not doing. Okay?” and added that SBA has, “as I’m sure our peers have, been fully evaluating all of our rights and opportunities to enforce our position.”
“It sounded menacing and we like that,” New Street Research analyst David Barden wrote in an investor note. “You have to stand up to a bully."
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