Charter-Cox Merger Provides Convergence Runway

WASHINGTON, May 16, 2025 – Charter Communications is poised to become the largest broadband provider in the country with its proposed $34.5 billion acquisition of Cox Communications. The expanded customer base will give Charter’s mobile offering more room to grow.

The combined company, which will eventually be called Cox Communications but keep Charter’s Spectrum brand, will have 69.5 million passings and 35.9 million  residential and business broadband subscribers. That would put it above the current largest ISP, Comcast, which has 62.7 million passings and 32.2 million broadband customers.

The deal comes as cable operators are continuing to shed broadband subscribers after a bad 2024. The discontinuing of the Affordable Connectivity Program, which gave internet discounts to 23 million low-income households, and competition from fixed wireless broadband led to continuous subscriber losses for cable.

The situation has not improved much, although it is much worse at Comcast, which lost a worst-ever 199,000 broadband subscribers last quarter.

“Together, we’ll be better positioned to compete in an expanding and dynamic marketplace,” Charter CEO Chris Winfrey said on a conference call Friday. “Our larger footprint will give us better marketing and branding capabilities.”

He said the combination “enhances our footprint efficiency and adds key markets,” plus the ability to “offer our products, with Spectrum pricing and packaging, to Cox’s customers.”

The larger footprint will likely be good for Charter’s mobile ambitions. The company, which counts 10.4 million wireless lines, is aiming to sell the service to more fixed broadband customers within its (soon to be expanded) wireline footprint. Cox only has 200,000 mobile customers, giving the combined company a lot of potential customers to add.

Major broadband providers are pushing such converged fixed and mobile offerings, which appear to keep customers around longer and can offer more favorable economics.

“For a variety of reasons, Cox is relatively late to the wireless game,” MoffettNathanson senior analyst Craig Moffett said in an email. “But that only means that the opportunity in their footprint is that much larger.”

In a conversation with Moffett on Thursday at a MoffettNathanson-hosted event, Winfrey said he was optimistic about mobile’s potential penetration in Charter’s current broadband subscriber base.

“I’m not giving that outlook and saying we’re going to hit 100 percent,” he said. “But from an economic perspective and from a product perspective, it really should be.” 

Analysts at both New Street Research and MoffettNathanson expect Cox to be brought under the terms of Charter’s mobile agreement with Verizon, which Moffett described as “almost certainly” more advantageous than Cox’s separate deal with the carrier. The companies, as well as Comcast, use Verizon infrastructure to provide mobile service where they can’t offload traffic via Wi-Fi or their own spectrum.

The deal is expected to close “sooner” than mid-2027, but executives didn’t get more specific. Charter’s all-stock acquisition of Liberty Broadband is speeding up to close at the same time as the Cox deal. 

Blair Levin, New Street’s policy advisor and former Federal Communications Commission chief of staff, wrote in a research note that he didn’t expect any major obstacles to regulatory approval. The FCC will have to approve the deal before it closes.

“​​We don’t think there is any material chance of the antitrust authorities rejecting the deal on competition grounds,” he wrote. 

KeyBanc analysts agreed with that assessment, saying the deal should “easily pass regulatory approvals.”

Levin wrote that geographic expansion deals like this one, where the companies involved operate in different markets, are usually allowed. He noted that Comcast’s bid to buy Time Warner Cable was ultimately withdrawn after opposition from the FCC and Department of Justice. The antitrust concerns at the time were related to online video and were obsolete now.

He wrote there was a chance the FCC may impose some kind of condition on the deal – FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has said he would block mergers if companies don’t roll back diversity initiatives and has extracted such concessions from companies with deals waiting on agency approval.

“Given the ability of the FCC Chair to kill any deal without a court review, and his willingness to bring non-competition issues into the review, there is some, though we think small, risk of a Trump Transaction Tax that could affect the value of the deal,” he wrote.

Consumer group Public Knowledge was opposed to more consolidation in the cable space.

“More consolidation won’t fix the cable industry, and introducing new sets of competitive problems is no way to address existing ones,” John Bergmayer, legal director at Public Knowledge, said in a statement. “As always with cable mergers, the question is as much a loss of opportunities for content creators and programmers to reach an audience, as the loss of choices to subscribers.”