The two biggest cable companies in the country have clearly bogged down. In the third quarter of 2023, Comcast lost 18,000 broadband customers while Charter gained 63,000. To contrast the extent of the slowdown, Charter gained over 1.3 million customers in 2021 while Charter gained 1.2 million. The growth during the pandemic was not extraordinary, and both companies added 1.4 million customers in 2019 before the pandemic.
The two companies are still the largest ISPs. Comcast had 32.3 million broadband customers at the end of the third quarter of 2023, while Charter had over 30.6 million. Third in size is AT&T at 15.3 million.
Charter is still slowly adding customers due to its strategy of building broadband in rural markets. In the third quarter, half of its growth came from rural areas. Charter won a significant amount of rural subsidy in the RDOF reverse auction in 2020 and has been aggressively pursuing state broadband grants since then. Comcast has also been chasing state grants, and analysts expect that both companies will pursue the upcoming BEAD grants.
There are a number of reasons for the sudden slowdown. At the top of the list is probably prices. The following are the current list prices for the most common broadband products. For both companies, the prices and speeds vary in some markets.
| Download | Upload | Price | |
| Charter | 300 Mbps | 10 Mbps | $84.99 |
| 500 Mbps | 20 Mbps | $104.99 | |
| 1 Gbps | 35 Mbps | $124.99 | |
| Comcast | 200 Mbps | 10 Mbps | $90 + $15 for router |
| 400 Mbps | 10 Mbps | $105 + $15 for router | |
| 800 Mbps | 20 Mbps | $110 + $15 for router | |
| 1 Gbps | 20 Mbps | $115 + $15 for router | |
| 1.2 Gbps | 35 Mbps | $120 + $15 for router |
These prices are significantly higher than the prices being charged by fiber competitors:
| Download | Upload | Price | |
| AT&T | 100 Mbps | 100 Mbps | $60 |
| 300 Mbps | 300 Mbps | $65 | |
| 1 Gbps | 1 Gbps | $80 | |
| 2 Gbps | 2 Gbps | $110 | |
| Frontier | 500 Mbps | 500 Mbps | $59.99 |
| 1 Gbps | 1 Gbps | $79.99 | |
| 2 Gbps | 2 Gbps | $109.99 | |
| Windstream | 500 Mbps | 500 Mbps | $60 |
| 1 Gbps | 1 Gbps | $85 | |
| Verizon | 300 Mbps | 300 Mbps | $49.99 |
| 500 Mbps | 500 Mbps | $69.99 | |
| 1 Gbps | 1 Gbps | $89.99 |
To offset the big price difference with competitors, both companies offer substantial discounts for new customers. Charter tends to continue to renew special pricing while a customer has to work harder to get the discounts at Comcast. Both companies are pushing bundles that include discounted cellular.
As the two charts demonstrate, another big difference is the upload speeds. Both cable companies are upgrading upload speeds to speeds between 100 Mbps and 300 Mbps using mid-split technology upgrades. Both have been talking about upgrading to DOCSIS 4.0 to get symmetrical speeds.
The other new competitor is FWA Cellular Wireless from T-Mobile and Verizon. We don’t know how much traction these companies have in competing against cable companies, but the two companies have added over 7 million customers in the last two years, while Comcast and Charter have stagnated.
| Download | Upload | Price | |
| T-Mobile | 100 Mbps | Best Effort | $65 |
| 100 Mbps | Best Effort | $60 with Autopay | |
| Verizon | 300 Mbps | Best Effort | $45 with Verizon Cell Plan |
| 300 Mbps | Best Effort | $60 | |
| 300 Mbps | Best Effort | $50 with Autopay |
It’s going to be interesting to see if the two cable companies increase rates in 2024. If they don’t, then the only path to higher earnings would be to cut back on customer or slash expenses.
Both companies have thrived on the combination of customer growth and revenue growth from rate increases. Both companies face a serious earnings challenge in the next few years as competitors chip away at customers.
Big caveat: all those speeds are advertised, not necessarily remotely related to actual. Our TMobile averages 20-ish down on a really good day.
There’s definitely some issues with how speeds are advertised and the ‘up to’ language being abused.
However, I think a lot of people are finding that they really don’t need those multi-hundred Mbps to Gbps speeds and the price of the TMobile ’20ish’ plan is more attractive to people.
Also, those prices listed here for the mobile services are basically all wrong. Sure, that’s the single-service price, but all of the cell vendors offer bundled pricing which gets you to 35-45/m for the home internet option AND these are regionally priced. Verizon and TMobile offer a $35 home internet bundle in my area for instance. That suits a lot of people very well even though it’s inconsistent on speeds and has a number of streaming limitations.
Ours is $50. “20-ish“ might be OK if it were consistent. However, if I am on a zoom call, my husband can’t be checking his email. We don’t have kids at home anymore, and a good thing, too, because they wouldn’t be able to be playing online games or submitting homework. Also, now that I’m retired, I don’t have to be downloading 8000 pages of medical records at a crack. We live in a vacation area come summer, the population of our little town will triple with people bringing their cellphones and tablets along… trees will be in leaf too, so we can forget about watching the game or trying to stream a movie until after Labor Day.
FWA and new fiber is finally catching up. In my area, wherever Frontier, MetroNet and smaller local ISP’s are installing a lot of FTTH, Charter is bleeding customers, and this should be expected as customers are getting better service, symmetrical speeds all at lower prices. Competition is good, except if you are Charter and the company is changing.
I’m hearing about management turnover at Charter, my guess is that there is some chaos as it’s becoming more obvious that competition is affecting their bottom line. I predict downsizing, more turnover and continued lowering of the stock price.
It’s their own fault, new housing developments all around me, yet year-after-year they continued to install coax when it wouldn’t have cost that much more to just go all fiber. Competition would have mostly stayed away and they would have kept their monopoly. I’ve said it for years, first one in with fiber wins. Charter will be relevant, they will screw over customers where they are still the only real option and unless get DOCSIS 4.0 gets rolled out and match competitors pricing they will struggle to be competitive with fiber.