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.

Eighty-five percent of Americans are bullish on their residential broadband service, NCTA blogged Monday, citing a Morning Consult survey it commissioned. It said when asked about download speeds, signal strength, cost, security and reliability, big majorities of respondents were satisfied. It said the survey of 2,208 adults was done Aug. 18-21.

Cable operators have been trying to confuse local governments about their obligations, and the FCC hasn't addressed the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' 2021 decision on the agency's 2019 local cable franchise authority order (see 2105260035), localities told Commissioners Anna Gomez and Geoffrey Starks, per a docket 22-69 filing Friday. The NATOA, National League of Cities, U.S. Conference of Mayors and National Association of Counties representatives urged the FCC to implement the court ruling that cable operators charging local governments for franchise obligations need to do so at marginal costs and clarify that local governments should be required to pay the marginal cost of only their use of institutional data networks and not for cable system deployment to serve small businesses and other nonresidential consumers that use institutional networks. The localities also urged repeal of the FCC's mixed use rule, saying the 6th Circuit "found it does not correctly state the law." The localities also said they backed the agency's pending digital discrimination proposals and said local elected officials should have better means for updating the national broadband map to use it to monitor the state of digital discrimination.

Comcast will launch a variety of symmetrical speed broadband tiers in Colorado Springs next week in its first residential rollout of its DOCSIS 4.0 network upgrades, it said Thursday. It said it will offer 300 Mbps, 500 Mbps, 1 Gbps and 2 Gbps symmetrical speed services there. It said the DOCSIS 4.0 rollout will expand to Philadelphia and Atlanta before year's end.