WOW! Down 4,900 Broadband Subs

Nov. 5, 2025 – WideOpenWest (WOW!) reported 4,900 lost broadband subscribers in the third quarter, more than last quarter and more than the same time last year.

The cable operator is being taken private by investment firms Digital Bridge and Crestview Partners in a $1.5 billion deal, and thus didn’t offer comments on its results during a short earnings call Wednesday morning. Crestview is already a major investor in WOW!.

The transaction is expected to close by the end of the year or in the first quarter of 2026.

The company added 3,700 fiber subscribers in its expansion markets, which are composed of greenfield builds and “edge-out” projects adjacent to the company’s legacy footprint, partially offsetting losses in its legacy footprint. WOW! Counts 464,500 total broadband subscribers.

WOW! built out to an additional 19,200 locations in its expansion footprint, with 15,200 of those being greenfield and 3,700 being edge-out projects. Of the company’s 2 million-location footprint, a total of 223,300 are in expansion markets.

The company has a mobile product, but hasn’t been leaning into it as heavily as its cable operator peers. Giants Comcast and Charter have been pushing their mobile plans as a way to entice customers to stick around longer.

Those incumbents are the primary competitors in WOW!’s legacy markets, in addition to fixed wireless service from the major mobile carriers, CEO Teresa Elder said.

She said the company is also feeling good about its expansion markets.

“In greenfield, we actually have been on a tear,” she said. “Penetration keeps growing at a robust rate.”

WOW!’s greenfield penetration rate remained at 16 percent, the same as last quarter, but Elder noted the company added more than 15,000 homes in that footprint.

Industry report

In a Wednesday report, New Street Research analyst David Barden noted that net subscriber additions across the broadband industry exceeded pre-pandemic levels in the third quarter. That would seem to have been good news for cable companies, which have been hemorrhaging subscribers, but Barden said it mostly came from fixed wireless services continuing to perform well.

“Improvement in industry net adds driven by higher FWA net adds obviously doesn’t help Cable,” he wrote. “Cable’s best-case scenario would be for industry net adds to improve and FWA net adds to slow down. We don’t see this scenario unfolding in the near to medium term. We aren’t sure that Cable does either.”

Comcast and Charter have said stiff competition is still putting pressure on their subscriber numbers, in addition to households increasingly opting for just a mobile connection and no fixed broadband.

That’s plausible, according to Barden. The Affordable Connectivity Program that shuttered last year provided 23 million low-income households with a monthly internet discount. In the absence of that, he wrote, many low-income households are once again not able to consistently afford monthly internet bills.

“Once ACP was shut down, these households struggled to stay connected on a consistent basis,” he wrote. “When they had to choose between keeping their fixed broadband connection or their mobile connection, they chose mobile.