Comcast Expecting More Broadband Losses Than Last Year for Q3
The company is working on a ‘cost transformation’ aimed at saving billions, CFO Jason Armstrong said
WASHINGTON, Sept. 9, 2026 – Comcast’s third quarter subscriber losses are likely going to be worse than last year, CFO Jason Amrstrong said Wednesday.
He said that was in large part due to “irrational pricing” from fiber providers offering gigabit speeds for $30-$40 per month.
In the third quarter of 2025, the cable giant lost 91,000 residential broadband subscribers.
“For the full year, we’ll improve our broadband subscriber losses,” Armstrong said. “I think quarters are going to look different within that. This particular quarter, I don’t think we’ll improve year-over-year.”
Comcast lost 654,000 residential broadband subs last year and has lost 232,000 so far in 2026.
Armstrong spoke at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference in San Francisco.
KeyBanc analyst Brandon Nispel wrote in an investor note that if subscriber losses continued getting worse, Comcast would have to hold off on rate hikes or offer lower prices to stabilize them.
Some cable investors have feared that situation spiralling into continually lower average revenue per user (ARPU) and dwindling subscribers (Comcast is still one of the largest ISPs in the country, with more than 28 million residential subscribers). Comcast’s stock was down 6 percent Wednesday afternoon.
Armstrong said the company still expected to see a sequential improvement in broadband ARPU in the third quarter.
He said fixed wireless was still taking share in the broadband market, and that new fiber builds were overlapping Comcast’s footprint faster than before, about 4 or 5 percent annually compared to 2 to 3 percent a couple of years ago.
Still, he said the company was confident in its strategy of selling bundled fixed and mobile broadband to lower churn.
He pointed out that Comcast’s converged accounts, as they’re called, had an average revenue of $85, which he said was about half the major wireless carriers. That gives the company room to raise those rates without customers jumping ship.
The cable operator counts about 10.2 million wireless lines, and about 7 percent of its broadband subscribers also take mobile service, Armstrong said. Goldman analyst Michael Ng agreed the company would likely be able to sell mobile bundles to more of its broadband subscribers.
‘Cost transformation’
Armstrong said Comcast was working on an initiative to save billions in costs that could be reinvested in growing parts of the company.
“It’s not a budget exercise,” he said. “It is: How do we rewrite the rules of how we do business on the connectivity and technology side?”
He didn’t outline exactly what that would entail, but said the company would explain more on its third quarter earnings call, and likely sooner.
Armstrong mentioned a desire to “eliminate layers to get to much faster decision-making.” Last year Comcast said it would layoff some corporate employees as it moved away from a regional division structure.
He said some of the savings would be directed at wireless, but also added, “If you think about edge compute, the amount of data we have in our ecosystem, how do you go monetize that?”
