Charter Reports 177,000 Broadband Sub Loss in Q4
The number missed expectations but was better than what Comcast reported Thursday.
WASHINGTON, Jan. 31, 2025 – Charter Communications lost 177,000 broadband subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2024, worse than Wall Street had expected but closer to expectations than the results reported by fellow cable Internet access giant Comcast on Thursday.
“The miss relative to consensus was much less than it was for Comcast yesterday, and so even if the result is disappointing for some, it will be a relief after yesterday,” New Street Research analyst Jonathan Chaplin wrote in an investor note.
Wall Street had predicted 155,000 lost connections. Comcast, by comparison, reported Thursday 139,000 lost subscribers, compared to about the 100,000 that it forecast to investors the month prior. Charter is the second-largest broadband ISP in the country with about 30.1 million subscribers.
Charter CFO Jessica Fischer in a call with Wall Street analysts Friday morning said 140,000 of the broadband losses were related to the shuttered Affordable Connectivity Program, plus 20,000 from hurricanes in the Southeast.
The ACP shutdown – which ceased a monthly internet discount for 23 million low-income households after May 31, 2024 – intensified increased fiber and fixed wireless competition in 2024, resulting in a year that was quite bad for cable generally, MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett wrote in an investor note. Analysts view the worst of that as in the past, but say it’s not clear that the cable industry will start adding subscribers any time soon.
“We doubt investors expect a return to growth in broadband subs at this stage (they certainly don’t for 2025),” Chaplin wrote. “An improvement from 2024 levels to a pace of steady, modest declines is likely good enough.”
To mitigate the situation, Comcast said yesterday it would lean into “convergence” – bundling its mobile service with its home broadband products. That’s something Charter’s been doing for more than a year.
Asked if the strategy had borne fruit, Charter CEO Chris Winfrey said the company saw a “much lower” churn rate among subscribers that take both fixed and mobile plans. It’s similar to what the big mobile carriers – also leaning into convergence but pairing wireless with fiber service – have said.
Charter added 529,000 mobile subscribers in the fourth quarter, for a total of 9.9 million. Both Charter and Comcast offer the product through network capacity leasing deals with Verizon. A broader industry push for bundling mobile and fixed broadband could be a bright spot for cable, according to Moffett, as they’re the ones with large national wireline footprints.
“In short, cable is poised to win the convergence wars,” he wrote.
Charter counts nearly 57 million passings and Comcast has more than 60 million, giving them more runway to actually offer converged services. The most ambitious of the wireless carriers, AT&T, is targeting 50 million fiber passings by 2029.
Asked if the company might be interested in standing up its own mobile network to avoid the fees it pays to Verizon, Winfrey said Charter already offloads 87 percent of its mobile traffic from Verizon’s network via a combination of CBRS and Wi-Fi. He said the company is continuing to deploy CBRS radios in “a multitude of markets.”
“Our margins look very good on the product,” Winfrey said. “So there’s no driving force for us to say we need to have owner’s economics.”
On the rural build front, Fischer said Charter’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund projects are still on track to be done by 2026, two years ahead of schedule. She said the company’s spending should start to wind down, “from $12 billion in 2025 to less than $8 billion in 2028,” with planned network upgrades on track to finish in 2027 and only sporadic BEAD participation. For Moffett, that extra cash on hand could translate to a big jump in the company’s stock price in 2025.
There’s been a lot of talk about T-Mobile or Comcast potentially buying Charter, but neither came up directly on the call.
Winfrey “talked about the benefits of near-national scale at one point, which made it seem like he was talking about a Comcast deal,” Chaplin wrote. “We would reiterate that the Comcast / Charter deal may be easier to do with Charter as the acquirer, for regulatory reasons.”
