Today’s blog looks at the market performance of Cable One. Cable One is a traditional cable company that markets under the name Sparklight. The company has over one million broadband customers. I’ve written about most other large cable companies, and I’m highlighting them in this blog since they seem to be suffering from the same problems facing other cable companies.

It’s not entirely fair to refer to Cable One as a cable company, because the company has deemphasized cable TV sales for a number of years. They were one of the first cable companies to publicly say that its future is broadband.

Cable One has seen an erosion of customers similar to other cable companies. The last quarter that the company added broadband customers was in the first quarter of 2024. At that time, the company had 1,066,400 broadband customers. There has been a loss of broadband customers in every quarter since, with the company having 1,031,300 customers at the end of the second quarter of 2025 – a loss of 2.6% of the customer base. That loss is similar to the biggest cable companies – Comcast lost 2.6% and Charter lost 2.2%. It’s far better than Altice (5.4%) and Breezeline (6.2%).

The loss of customers has resulted in an erosion of revenues. There has been a drop in revenues every quarter since the third quarter of 2022 ($1.71 B) to the second quarter of 2025 ($1.54 B). The drop in net income is far more dramatic, from $376 million in the second quarter of 2022 to $20.3 million in the first quarter of 2025. The company experienced a precipitous drop in net income in the second quarter of this year, with a loss of $496 million, mostly driven by a $456 million write-off due to asset impairment related to the company’s drop in stock prices.

Stock prices are the big story for the company. At the end of the second quarter of 2022, the company’s stock was $918.77 per share. It’s seen a steady drop since then, and when I wrote this blog, the stock was at $168.23.

The company’s worsening performance can be tied to a number of issues that affect every big cable company:

• Intense Competition. The company is seeing significant competition from fiber overbuilders as well as FWA cellular broadband.
• Stagnant Churn. An issue that is not discussed much is that broadband customers are not hopping between ISPs nearly as much as in the past. ISPs are often offering special pricing for a multi-year contracts to keep customers from churning, and it seems to be working.
• Fixed Footprint. The smaller cable companies like Cable One are not expanding service areas. Comcast and Charter are expanding to some degree through greenfields and grant opportunities, but even they aren’t seeing a big overall growth in passings.
• Price Pressure. Competition is forcing cable companies to offer special prices to keep customers, driving down ARPU (average revenue per user). This can be offset by rate increases, but that becomes a limited strategy in competitive markets.

It’s hard to know the future for companies like Cable One. It faces a giant challenge if it wants to grow revenues or even hold them steady. I have no knowledge of this, but it would seem that the company must be an acquisition target for a larger ISP. The only other cable company with more than a million customers that is not part of the giant ISP is Altice.