Wideopenwest is piloting a test in the Panama City, Florida, market using distributed access architecture modes to increase capacity on its hybrid coaxial fiber network and offer multi-gig speeds, it said Tuesday. The cabler said the tested technology lays the framework for offering symmetrical multi-gig speeds via DOCSIS 4.0. It said under the test, customers in a specifically designated area will enjoy speeds of 2 Gbps/200 Mbps. Test phases will make those speeds available to current and new subscribers in additional markets later.
Kentucky cable operator Duo Broadband is dropping its traditional cable TV service at year's end and is notifying customers on its website. It cited "extreme costs associated with Cable TV systems, maintenance, and facilities." In addition, it said large programming fee increases "would have required significant, continued price increases that would be a burden for our customers." Duo said pricing also is moving it to drop its streaming TV service, and it's directing subscribers to the Mybundle service to find alternative over the top services.
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 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%.
About 50% of Comcast's footprint faces fiber competition, with that figure expected to reach 60% in the next few years and continue growing, its Chief Financial Officer Jason Armstrong said Thursday during a Morgan Stanley investor conference. Comcast adds roughly 300,000 wireless subscribers per quarter and will likely accelerate that pace with subscription deals, he added. It completed 850,000 line extensions in 2022 and is on track to do more than a million this year. It will likely exceed that figure in 2024, he said.
High interest rates and inflation helped hammer WideOpenWest's subscriber numbers, with the company losing 4,400 high-speed data subscribers in Q3 and expecting to lose "significantly more" in Q4, CEO Teresa Elder said last week as WOW announced Q3 financial results. She said WOW is also facing increased competition, with fixed wireless more aggressively competing at lower-speed tiers in several of its markets. WOW stock closed Thursday at $3.19, down 57%. Noting construction has begun on plans to pass 80,000 new homes in Michigan, with construction to start next year on similar network expansions in Minnesota and Florida, she said WOW is on target to bring its network to 400,000 additional homes by the end of 2027. Since the company's August launch of YouTube TV as its primary video offering (see 2308020007), more than 13% of new subscribers have signed up for the subscription VOD service, said Elder. While WOW hasn't forced customers off its legacy video service so far, she said that in the next 12 to 18 months it wants "to completely get off of our QAM network" and will start forcing them off. WOW finished Q3 with 503,400 high-speed data subscribers, down from 518,600 the same quarter a year earlier; 100,800 video subs, down from 129,900; and 82,700 telephony subs, down from 92,900.
The cable industry's distributed access architecture deployment cycle -- with DAA deployments enabling DOCSIS 3.1 upgrades and eventually a DOCSIS 4.0 rollout -- is still in its early days, with most of the upgrade work likely to happen between 2024 and 2027, Dell'Oro Group's Jeff Heynen blogged Friday. Comcast and Cox today account for 38% of the DAA node or module market, but purchases by Charter and other cable operators will also drive significant equipment purchases, he said.
Don't expect Cable One to get into mobile service anytime soon, Todd Koetje, chief financial officer, said in an analyst call last week as the company announced Q3 financial results. He said it's monitoring wireless offerings by other cable operators, "but nothing right now that says, economically or from a customer demand perspective, that that's a product we have to have." CEO Julia Laulis said the company is "navigating the final stages of decline" of its video offering and is "preparing for an environment without a video business." She didn't say when it expects that to happen. The company said average customer data demand is 646 Gb a month, with more than 20% of residential subscribers exceeding 1 Tb of usage a month, while revenues for the quarter were $420.3 million, down $4.4 million from the same quarter a year ago. Koetje said the slide was due to a continual decline in lower-margin residential subscribers and business video revenues. Laulis said Cable One this fall rolled out a 100 Mbps/$25 month broadband offer aimed at more cost-conscious subscribers. Cable One said it ended the quarter with 959,000 residential primary service units, down about 7,000 year over year; 141,000 video PSUs, down 50,000; and 82,000 voice PSUs, down 13,000.
While Altice continues to lose broadband subscribers, that rate of decline from quarter to quarter is slowing and could stabilize in 2024, CEO Dennis Mathew said Wednesday afternoon in a call with analysts as Altice announced Q3 results. He said Altice’s East footprint fiber customers all have 8 Gbps symmetrical speeds available, and the company is expanding 8 Gbps symmetrical availability. He said the company ended the quarter with 91% of its West footprint upgraded to DOCSIS 3.1, and 1 Gbps is available to more than 95% of its overall footprint. In addition, Altice is simplifying its broadband speed tiers, and as part of that is retiring a number of low-end speed tiers, said Mathew. The company said Q3 marked Altice's third straight quarter of mobile line growth acceleration, ending Q3 with 4.2 million residential broadband customers, down 100,000 year over year; 2.2 million video subs, down 250,000; 1.6 million telephony subs, down 250,000; and 288,000 mobile lines, up 52,000. Revenues were $2.3 billion for the quarter, down $77 million year over year. Asked about the traditional pay-TV video marketplace, Mathew called it “broken” as consumers increasingly shift from linear to streaming, but linear costs continue to rise.
Charter Communications' carriage deal struck with Disney last month (see 2309110034) is a road map that can point to broadband benefits for other cable operators and is potentially a way of retaining broadband subscribers in the face of fiber overbuild and fixed wireless competition, Dell'Oro Group Jeff Heynen blogged Monday. The spectrum and bandwidth freed up for Charter in the deal means more bandwidth available for broadband subs, he said. That bandwidth reclamation could be significant for cable operators that never deployed switched digital video, he said. As more video viewers switch to over-the-top services, cable operators are increasingly moving to a role as content aggregators as a means of trying to ensure those nonlinear video subs remain broadband customers, he said.
Shentel is buying Ohio-based fiber network operator Horizon in a $385 million cash and stock deal, the cable operator said Tuesday night. Shentel CEO Christopher French said the Horizon deal lets Shentel accelerate its fiber strategy, doubling the size of its commercial fiber business and creating new opportunities for its Glo Fiber business. Shentel said the deal is expected to close in the first half of 2024, pending regulatory approvals.