Charter Down 172,000 Broadband Subs
The company added 406,000 mobile lines, ahead of expectations
WASHINGTON, July 24, 2026 – Charter reported worse than expected broadband losses in the second quarter of 2026, shedding 172,000 subscribers.
That’s also worse than the same time last year.
Customer churn was roughly flat, Charter CEO Chris Winfrey said on the company’s earnings call, but low gross additions drove the subscriber loss. Similar to fellow cable giant Comcast, Charter was still seeing stiff competition from fiber and fixed wireless providers.
“We continue to see expanded fixed wireless competition versus a year ago, including lower sales from low-income customers,” said CFO Jessica Fischer, plus “fiber overlap growth at a rate similar to prior quarters, with aggressive promotions by certain competitors.”
Average revenue per user (ARPU) for broadband was also down both sequentially and year-over-year to $70.16. Winfrey said that was the result of aggressive retention offers that didn’t pan out and were discontinued.
Fischer said the metric would improve over the course of the year, with the retention promotions in the past and a rate hike coming in the third quarter.
On Thursday Comcast also reported more broadband losses than expected, but the company was optimistic because it was an improvement over the same time last year. Either way, it doesn’t appear the cable industry will start reversing its subscriber exodus any time soon, New Street Research analyst Vikash Harlalka wrote in an investor note
“With converged fiber operators ratcheting up the competition with their aggressive offers, a material recovery in broadband adds seems unlikely in the near future,” he wrote. “Investors need to be braced for subscriber losses remaining elevated for now.”
Winfrey has said in the past he thought Charter’s rural build-outs would have fared better without the presence of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite service, but Fischer said Friday that “we haven’t observed meaningful share loss to Starlink, including in our subsidized rural footprint, but we continue to monitor it closely and take it seriously.”
Fischer said Charter expects its capex to start declining after this year when those subsidized rural builds finish up, with a projected fall from $12 billion in the last year to $8 billion in 2028.
Mobile
On mobile, Charter fared better. The company added 406,000 mobile lines for a total of 12.5 million, ahead of expectations.
Mobile and video bundles, along with efforts to address longstanding customer frustrations around price transparency and customer service, are big parts of Charter and Comcast’s bid to turn things around with broadband subscribers.
About 20 percent of Charter’s 29.4 million broadband subscribers take at least one mobile line, Winfrey said.
He also said Charter was offloading about 87 percent of its mobile traffic via Wi-Fi and its own CBRS spectrum. That saves the company money under its mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) deal with Verizon.
The number was above 88 percent, he said, but the company allowed some extra mobile usage in the quarter to go over Verizon’s 5G network to “improve the customer experience.”
“For comparison, a typical Verizon customer might offload 80% of traffic onto Wi-Fi. A 90% offload instead means 50% lower marginal costs,” MoffettNathanson founder Craig Moffett wrote in an investor note. “We believe [Charter and Comcast] enjoy the lowest total cost of service of any operator in the market.”
The cable giants do offer cheaper fixed and mobile bundles. Those converged offers are also a big focus of Verizon and AT&T, which have smaller wireline networks.
That’s a point in favor of the cable industry, Moffett has often noted, since they can offer those bundles in far more places. Charter will have more than 70 million passings after its $34.5 billion acquisition of Cox closes, which is now planned for “mid to late August,” Winfrey said.
Last quarter Winfrey said he was interested in buying more cable assets, but he said Friday he was focused on the Cox deal.
"Investors have been asking us about what might come next, but the reality is we have a large transaction in front of us right now which creates significant value," he said.
Satellite
Bloomberg reported last month that Charter had been in talks with SpaceX to offload some of the satellite company’s direct-to-device traffic.
Asked about the reports, Winfrey said: “Anytime that we think we can enhance our own product capabilities, or do things that are innovative in the marketplace, or we can lower costs for customers, those are the types of conversations that we have with many industry players. We do that all the time.”
He added that “you should expect us to continue to do that across the board. When there’s something to announce or talk about, we’ll do that. That certainly is not the case today.”
