Comcast Adds Record 414,000 Wireless Lines

WASHINGTON, Oct. 30, 2025 – Comcast added a record number of new wireless lines in the third quarter, posting 414,000 additions.

That beat Wall Street estimates of 390,000 and gives the cable giant a total of more than 8.9 million mobile subscribers.

“While we invest to stabilize broadband, wireless is our core growth engine,” Jason Armstrong, Comcast’s CFO, said on the company’s earnings call.

This summer, Comcast instituted a promotion offering a one-year free mobile line to new and existing broadband customers. It’s apparently working, as executives said nearly half of the residential postpaid phone additions came from customers taking them up on the offer.

About 14 percent of the company’s broadband base now also has a mobile line, a number the ISP is looking to grow in a bid to further reduce subscriber churn.

Broadband losses were 104,000 in the quarter, better than the 138,000 analysts had expected. Analysts said that could be a sign the overall broadband market is recovering and returning to pre-pandemic strength, especially after some strong results were reported in fixed wireless and fiber.

“Given the strong negative bias towards cable these days, the market perhaps understandably read these early FWA and FTTH results as necessarily coming at Cable’s expense,” MoffettNathanson founder Craig Moffett said in an investor note. “But Comcast’s modestly better-than-expected results YoY could be a sign that it is the market itself that is starting to heal.”

New Street Research analyst Vikash Harlalka said in a note that the firm expected cable losses to moderate if the industry was in fact recovering. New Street predicted the residential broadband market would report adding nearly 600,000 subs in the third quarter, more than pre-pandemic levels.

Comcast has also instituted new plans and price locks to address longstanding customer frustration over price hikes. While the subscriber numbers were a sign the move was working, the measures, along with the free mobile lines, pushed average revenue per user (ARPU) down 1 percent from last quarter.

Armstrong said that decline would continue in the fourth quarter of 2025, and that Comcast didn’t plan on increasing broadband prices at all in the early part of 2026.

“Comcast’s period of ‘investment’ in its Connectivity and Platforms segment is still in its early innings,” Moffett wrote. “But the early signs are encouraging. We can assume that newly-named CEO of Connectivity and Platforms Steve Croney (formerly COO) will continue, and accelerate, the current (new) path.”

The company made the announcement Thursday morning that Croney would be CEO of its connectivity unit starting Jan. 1, 2026. Dave Watson, the current CEO, will become Comcast’s vice chairman and Mike Cavanagh, the company’s president, will become co-CEO with current CEO Brian Roberts.

Moffett wrote he expected Comcast ARPU to eventually return to 3-4 percent year over year. He noted that AT&T, the largest fiber provider, instituted a $5 price hike set to take effect in December, and its ARPU was increasing twice as fast as Comcast’s.

Warner Bros. Discovery?

In response to an analyst question about potentially buying some or all of Warner Bros. Discovery, Cavanagh said he thinks “more things are viable than maybe some of the public commentary that’s out there.”

Analysts have indeed maintained that President Donald Trump’s disdain for MSNBC, Comcast’s liberal-leaning cable channel, would likely lead the administration to block any Comcast acquisition, regardless of the competitive impacts.

Moffett called the acquisition “a match, on paper at least, made in heaven” and a “hand-in-glove fit almost across the board.”

“But… To put it gently, this administration isn’t a fan of Comcast; both the President and FCC Chairman [Brendan] Carr have made that clear,” he wrote. “Comcast’s appearance on the list of donors for the White House ballroom isn’t going to change that.”

New Street’s Blair Levin has said the same, saying the ballroom donation, reportedly more than $5 million, wouldn’t be enough to change Trump’s tune. Nor would Comcast spinning off MSNBC and other assets into a separate entity.

“We can’t envision what would enable a détente between Trump and Roberts,” he wrote in a recent investor note.