Comcast CFO Says 2025 an ‘Investment Year’
Armstrong outlines plans to prioritize wireless and broadband as competition mounts.
WASHINGTON, Sept. 4, 2025 – Comcast CFO Jason Armstrong framed 2025 as “an investment year,” telling investors the company will prioritize broadband and wireless expansion, as competition from fiber and fixed wireless accelerates.
Speaking at Citi’s 2025 Global Technology, Media and Telecommunications Conference on Thursday, Armstrong pointed to wireless as Comcast’s “biggest addressable market” of the six core businesses soon to make up 70 percent of the company’s revenue.
On broadband, Armstrong emphasized intensifying competition from fiber providers may cause Comcast to step up its own investments.
“We’ve always expected to see two multi-gig wires into the vast majority of our footprint. That’s never changed… we’re in a period where there’s pretty intense fiber overbuilding at this point, so maybe we get to the endpoint sooner than we thought,” he said.
Armstrong added that the bigger surprise has been the “durability of fixed wireless,” which he described as a permanent fixture in the market, particularly for value-conscious consumers willing to trade speed for price.
His comments come just weeks after Comcast reported losing 226,000 broadband subscribers in the second quarter of 2025, marking the steepest decline since growth first turned negative in 2022.
Despite those losses, Armstrong pointed to healthy usage trends. He reported average household usage was now over 800 gigabytes per month, up roughly 10 percent year over year, with consumers connecting 40 percent more devices than they did five years ago. “Broadband is moving its way continually up the utility stack for the average customer,” he said.
Armstrong also suggested Comcast’s wireless strategy could evolve beyond its current MVNO deal with Verizon, noting the company’s spectrum holdings, 20 million Wi-Fi hotspots, and strand power infrastructure could one day support its own antennas.
“We’ve got a spectrum position. We’ve got deep capillary networks. We’ve got powering. So to the extent we wanted to go strand mount antennas, we’d have the opportunity to do that on a broader basis,” he said.
He closed by acknowledging the near-term trade-off. “This is an investment year. It’s going to be more difficult for us to grow [Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization] EBITDA, but early signs are positive,” Armstrong said.
“Do we maximize EBITDA, or are we maximizing the contribution to overall connectivity and helping support the broadband business?” Armstrong asked. “I think the answer is more the latter.”
Armstrong said Comcast plans to wind down segments that are largely cash generative but not growing by the end of 2025, including the spin-off of cable networks like USA, CNBC, and E!, and the sale of Sky Germany, the company’s German pay-TV subsidiary.
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