Comcast Broadband Sub Losses Improving
The company said it’s not yet seeing an impact from Starlink in rural areas
WASHINGTON, July 23, 2026 – Comcast lost 167,000 broadband subscribers in the second quarter of 2026, the company announced Thursday.
That’s only slightly worse than analysts had expected, and better than the same time last year for the second quarter in a row. It was a decline sequentially, following a quarter where the Super Bowl and Olympics gave Comcast a massive audience to advertise to.
That’s still encouraging given the company’s ongoing efforts to slow the steady stream of broadband losses, CFO Jason Armstrong said on the company’s earnings call.
The company thinks the competition that’s been helping drive those losses for years is here to stay.
“Fiber continues to expand, fixed wireless is aggressive, satellite is emerging as another alternative, and convergence-based promotional activity remains elevated across the industry,” Armstrong said. “We are operating under the assumption that the market will remain intensely competitive.”
MoffettNathanson founder Craig Moffett actually had a more optimistic view of the competition the cable giant will be facing going forward.
He noted AT&T’s consumer fixed wireless results were worse than expected, and Verizon’s have been decelerating for the past year. It’s possible satellite service, if it does take market share in rural areas, might also dissuade fiber ISPs from going forward with buildouts that would eat into Comcast’s customer base
“Turnarounds must start somewhere. It’s not unreasonable to be at least a little optimistic,” he wrote. “There is a plausible case that we’ve already seen the worst of the broadband declines not just for subscribers but also for ARPU.”
On the ARPU (average revenue per user) front, the metric for broadband subscribers was $73.27, in line with expectations but down 3.8 percent from the same time last year. The number has been decreasing this year as the company refused rate hikes and rolled out cheaper plans.
Customers also keep taking the company up on its offer of a free mobile line for one year. That promotion has been going for a year, and the company expects its ARPU trends to improve next quarter as more of those lines convert to paying customers, Armstrong said.
“A significant majority of our free line roll-off customers are converting from free to paid, as expected,” said Steve Croney, CEO of Comcast’s connectivity unit.
Wireless
The cable giant added a record 448,000 mobile lines. That’s the second record-breaking quarter in a row, and puts Comcast at nearly 10.2 million wireless subscribers.
About half of the new subscribers are taking a free line, Croney said.
Bundling fixed and mobile broadband is a big part of Comcast’s effort to reverse its subscriber losses. Croney said about 17 percent of its 28.5 million residential broadband subscribers also took at least one mobile line.
That’s also the strategy of other big ISPs like AT&T and Verizon: get customers buying two services, and they’ll be less likely to switch. Moffett thinks the trend is good for cable companies thanks to their sprawling wireline footprints.
“Convergence is a game that Comcast can win,” he wrote. “Its converged offers are cheaper than competitors’. Its converged costs are lower as well. And its converged footprint is vastly larger.”
Satellite competition
On Starlink, Armstrong said Comcast was “not seeing them as a meaningful competitive factor in our markets,” but that he and other executives “fully expect to see them as more of a competitor over time,” especially for broadband subscribers in rural markets.
He said the company hoped to defend its footprint with higher speeds, plus its overarching efforts to address customer frustrations around pricing and customer service.
Asked if Comcast would consider partnering with SpaceX somehow, Armstrong said: “We’ll certainly explore ways to create value, whether that’s Starlink or others, where we can serve our customers better and differently.”
The company already has a deal to offer SpaceX’s satellite service to its enterprise customers.
Bloomberg reported last month that SpaceX was in talks with Charter to potentially offload some mobile traffic from its direct-to-device service. Moffett has written that wouldn’t do much to help a capacity-constrained service really take share from the mobile carriers.
The way to do that would be a deal directly with one of the carriers, he wrote this week, the same way the cable companies offer their mobile service. Given cable’s success, carriers aren’t expected to allow another competitor into the fold.
