Charter Could See Broadband Sub Losses in Q4
Charter Communications is confident about competing for residential broadband customers in the long term, but there are short-term "challenges," Chief Financial Officer Jessica Fischer said Tuesday during UBS' Global Media and Communications Conference. She said a soft November points to…
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Charter losing broadband subs in Q4. Fischer said the first phase of Charter's network update to multigig speeds, happening in about 15% of its footprint, should improve trends in those markets, Fischer noted, adding the second phase would start in a few months. Fixed wireless is a bigger competitive challenge in parts of Charter's footprint where there's not a fiber overbuilder, she said. FW is attracting "more price-conscious" subscribers, but Charter expects many will come back as it becomes more capacity constrained, she said. The pace of fiber overbuilding should start to slow as the costs of capital and construction have increased and as fiber overbuilders already have their networks in the areas with the highest densities and most desirable customers, she said. "Over time, their passes are getting more expensive and getting more challenging from a demographic perspective as they continue to build," she said. Charter is on track to do 400,000 rural passings this year, up from the 300,000 it projected, she said. The cabler "absolutely" will pursue the same approach with other programmers it did with Disney (see 2309110034) of including a video-on-demand service as part of its bundle and dropping networks that are available via that VOD service, she said. Xumo -- its streaming platform joint venture with Comcast -- is now the primary product being deployed to new video customers, though Charter is not going to proactively swap out traditional cable boxes for Xumo boxes, she said. Charter will operate with quadrature amplitude modulation video "for a long time," but eventually will see efficiencies from that shrinking QAM video footprint. Charter stock closed Tuesday at $364.40, down 8.7%.