Tag Archives: Comcast

COVID-19 Boosts 1Q 2020 Broadband Subscribers

Leichtman Research Group recently released the broadband customer statistics for the end of the first quarter of 2020 for the largest cable and telephone companies. Leichtman compiles most of these numbers from the statistics provided to stockholders other than Cox, which is estimated. Leichtman says this group of companies represents 96% of all US landline broadband customers.

The big news is that additions in the first quarter were up nearly 85% over the number of customers added in the fourth quarter of 2019.  For the quarter, these large ISPs collectively saw growth that annualizes to 4.8%. This was the biggest quarterly overall subscriber growth since early 2015.

3/31/20 1Q Change % Change 4Q 19 Adds
Comcast 29,106,000 477,000 1.7% 443,000
Charter 27,246,000 582,000 2.2% 339.000
AT&T 15,315,000 (74,000) -0.5% (186,000)
Verizon 6,982,000 26,000 0.4% (5,000)
Cox 5,230,000 60,000 1.2% 25,000
CenturyLink 4,667,000 (11,000) -0.2% (36,000)
Altice 4,237,300 50,100 1.2% 7,000
Frontier 3,480,000 (33,000) -0.9% (55,000)
Mediacom 1,349,000 21,000 1.6% 12,000
Windstream 1,067,300 18,000 1.7% 9,300
WOW 797,600 16,100 2.1% 7,600
Cable ONE 793,000 20,000 2.6% 83,862
Consolidated 786,125 1,960 0.2% 14
TDS 460,000 4,800 1.1% 17,500
Atlantic Broadband 457,233 5,770 1.3% 5,326
Cincinnati Bell 427,500 1,800 0.4% 1,600
Total 102,401,158 1,166,530 1.2% 669,788
Total Cable 69,216,233 1,231,970 1.8% 922,788
Total Telco 33,184,925 (65,440) -0.2% (253,586)

We know that a lot of the growth was due to COVID-19, which drove employees and students to work from homes. A lot of homes likely purchased broadband for this purpose. These big ISPs also pledged to the FCC that they wouldn’t disconnect customers for non-payment during the pandemic. However, the real impact of that policy won’t show up until the second quarter.

Comcast and Charter continue to dominate the rest of industry, and accounted for 86% of total net growth for the quarter. The large cable companies collectively gained over 922,000 subscribers, which their biggest quarterly growth since 2007. The telcos collectively still lost customers for the quarter, but losses are significantly less than in 2019. The biggest telco loser was AT&T which lost 186,000 customers for the quarter. Frontier continued to lose the biggest percentage of its customer base and lost nearly 1% of its broadband customer base during the quarter.

This growth is impressive, and much of the boost has to be due to an increased need for home broadband. We’ll have to wait until later in the year to see the impact of having over 36 million people file for unemployment and for potentially millions of small businesses to close. There has been a long-running debate in the industry about whether broadband is recession-proof. Arguments can be made that homes out of work will hang onto broadband as long as they can in the hopes it can help them find work. In a few quarters, we’ll find out.

A Bad Year for the Cable Industry

The traditional cable TV industry had a miserable 2019. Collectively the biggest cable TV providers lost over 5.9 million subscribers during the year, almost 7% of the total customer base. The impacts of COVID-19, along with the already existing trends in the industry spell bad news for the industry in 2020.

I expect that customer losses will accelerate over 2019 levels. The majority of subscribers leaving traditional cable cite cost as the primary reason, and as millions of people lose their jobs, one of the first things they are going to do is to ditch traditional cable for something less expensive. For years, nationwide surveys of subscriber sentiment have shown that as many as 20% of households each year contemplate dropping traditional cable TV, but for a variety of reasons many households don’t get around to doing so. This year a lot of these homes are finally going to make the change.

The industry has also lost its largest advertising draw in sports. MoffettNathanson predicted that just losing the spring and early summer sports could cost the industry as much as $26 billion in advertising. If COVID-19 carries forward through baseball and into football season those numbers will climb much higher. The MoffettNathanson numbers also didn’t include the impact on Comcast of delaying the Olympics for a year, which are a significant piece of corporate earnings. The impact of sports advertising will be uneven throughout the industry because of contractual relationships. Many contracts require networks to continue to pay for sports rights to the various sports leagues even if the games aren’t played, but contracts also require the leagues to compensate networks for lost advertising revenue. That’s going to mean a lot of lawsuits, but the bottom line is that sports leagues and cable networks will both lose a lot of revenue.

Advertising is taking additional hits. Travel-based advertising has already disappeared. It’s also now obvious that a lot of local advertising is drying up as small businesses feel the pinch from this crisis, affecting both local TV stations and newspapers. A number of small newspapers around the country have already folded, and local television and radio stations are likely to follow.

Another big hit for the industry will come as the production of new content has slowed to a crawl. Movie and television studios have put the production of new content on hold. How long will homes remain happy crawling through the old content on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, etc?

Sports networks are in big trouble since they have no live content to share. Watching ESPN right now is downright sad for a sports fan. Sports fans might watch old playoff games on ESPN, FS1 and other networks for a few weeks, but that’s going to get quickly lose its appeal.

The programmers have already baked future rate increases into their future contracts with cable providers. With sports programming and new content both dwindling, I expect a lot of small telcos and cable companies will decide that this is a good time to ditch the cable product entirely. Half of my clients that offer cable TV have already been having internal discussions about if and when to walk away from cable – this year might provide the impetus to do so.

If there is any silver lining for the industry, it’s that this is an election year and there promises to be a lot of political advertising between now and November – at least in states with close races for President or with a heavily contested Senate race.

The cable industry was already under stress and this year ought to push it closer to the brink where the traditional cable model breaks. The industry isn’t to that brink yet and over 60% of homes are still subscribing to traditional cable TV. But as that number drops, many of the industry paradigms are going to break and the industry will either have to reinvent itself or undergo the slow death that we saw with residential landlines.

Cable Customers Plummet in 2019

The final numbers are in for 2019 and the largest cable providers collectively lost over 5.9 million customers for the year – a loss of almost 7% of customers. The numbers below come from Leichtman Research Group which compiles these numbers from reports made to investors, except for Cox which is estimated. The numbers reported are for the largest cable providers, and Leichtman estimates that these companies represent 95% of all cable customers in the country.

Following is a comparison of the end of 2018 and 2019:

4Q 2019 4Q 2018 Change % Change
Comcast 21,254,000 21,986,000 (732,000) -3.3%
Charter 16,144,000 16,606,000 (462,000) -2.9%
DirecTV 16,033,000 19,222,000 (3,189,000) -16.6%
Dish TV 9,394,000 9,905,000 (511,000) -5.2%
Verizon 4,229,000 4,451,000 (222,000) -5.0%
Cox 3,865,000 4,015,000 (150,000) -3.7%
AT&T U-verse 3,440,000 3,704,000 (264,000) -7.1%
Altice 3,179,200 3,286,100 (106,900) -3.3%
Mediacom 710,000 776,000 (66,000) -8.5%
Frontier 660,000 838,000 (178,000) -21.2%
Cable ONE 314,000 318,061 (4,061) -1.3%
Atlantic Broadband 308,638 347,638 (39,000) -11.2%
Total 79,530,838 85,454,799 (5,923,961) -6.9%
Total Cable 45,774,838 47,334,799 (1,559,961) -3.3%
Total Satellite 25,427,000 29,127,000 (3,700,000 -12.7%
Total Telco 8,639,000 8,993,000 (664,000) -7.4%

These losses were offset a bit as the combination of Hulu Live, Sling TV and AT&T TV collectively added just over 1 million customers. Leichtman doesn’t have subscriber numbers for YouTube TV and a few others that are not publicly reported.

Some observations of the numbers:

  • The overall loss of nearly 7% of customers represents a free fall of traditional cable TV. At the worst of the downside, landlines dropped about 5% of market share per year.
  • The big loser is AT&T, which lost nearly 4.1 million video customers between DirecTV and AT&T U-verse, and AT&T TV. The losses were so large at DirecTV that Charter moved up to become the second largest cable provider.
  • The big percentage loser is Frontier that lost 21% of its cable customers for the year.
  • The cable big companies fared the best, but this is partially due to the fact that Comcast and Charter each added 1.4 million broadband customers for the year – and added cable customers as part of that growth.
  • Cable ONE’s losses are small due to the 2019 acquisition of Fidelity.

As large as these losses are, the losses for 2020 are likely to be a lot larger. The primary reason household still give for cutting the cord is the high price of traditional cable TV. My guess is that the uncertainty of household incomes this year are going to drive many more homes to save money by migrating to lower-cost entertainment alternatives.

An End to Data Caps?

All of the major ISPs that were enforcing data caps have lifted those caps in response to the COVID-19 crisis. This includes AT&T, Comcast, Cox, Mediacom, and CenturyLink. All of these companies justified data caps as a network management tool that was in place to discourage overuse of the network. That argument no longer holds water if these ISPs eliminate the during a crisis that is overtaxing networks more than we are likely to ever see again.

These companies eliminated the caps as a result of political pressure and from a mass public outcry. The caps were eliminated to make broadband more affordable in a time when millions of people are becoming unemployed. By eliminating the caps during this crisis, these ISPs have publicly admitted that the caps were about making money and not for any issues related to network traffic.

The lame justification these ISPs gave for data caps was always weak when other large ISPs like Charter, Verizon, Altice, Frontier, and Windstream never implemented data caps. A few ISPs on that list like Frontier and Windstream have some of the weakest networks in the country yet never sought to implement data caps as a traffic control measure.

AT&T has been the king of data caps. They have data caps that kick in as low as 150 gigabytes of monthly broadband usage on DSL lines. AT&T’s fixed wireless product for rural markets has a data cap that kicks in at 250 GB. Interestingly, customers buying the 300 Mbps on fiber have a 1 terabyte data cap while customers buying gigabit broadband on fiber are allowed unlimited usage. This also proves that the data caps aren’t about traffic control – the caps are removed from the largest data users. The AT&T caps are to encourage somebody buying 300 Mbps to upgrade to the faster service. AT&T is also the king of overage charges. For DSL and fixed wireless, the overage charges are $10 for each 50 GB, with a maximum monthly overage of a whopping $200. The monthly dollar cap on 300 Mbps service is $100.

Mediacom had the next lowest data caps at 400 Mbps. Comcast and Cox have had data caps at 1 TB. It’s been reported by customers that the companies aggressively enforce the caps. CenturyLink has mostly not billed the data caps, but the fact that they eliminated the caps during this crisis likely means they were billing it to some customers.

To put these data caps in context, OpenVault says that at the end of 2019 that the average households used 344 gigabytes of data, up from 275 gigabytes a year earlier. More germane to data caps, OpenVault says that nearly 1% of homes now use 2 terabytes per of data month and 7.7% use over 1 terabyte per month. The percentage of homes using over 1 terabyte climbed from 4% a year earlier. AT&T has likely been cleaning up with data caps charges while Comcast was just starting to see some real revenue from the caps.

What remains to be seen is if these ISPs reintroduce data caps sometime later this year. They can no longer make a straight-faced claim that data caps are in place to dissuade overuse of the network. If data caps had that kind of impact on networks, then during the crisis the ISPs should have tightened the data cap threshold to protect the many new households that are working from home or doing schoolwork remotely. The data caps have always been about money, nothing else.

Unfortunately, we have no recourse other than a loud public outcry if these ISPs renew the data caps. The FCC has completely washed its hands of broadband regulation and killed its authority to do anything about data caps. Most tellingly, when FCC Chairman Ajit Pai released a plea to ISPs to “Keep Americans Connected”, that plea didn’t even mention data caps. Chairman Pai asked ISPs not to disconnect customers for not paying and asked ISPs to provide more public hotspots.

I bet that when this crisis is over that the big ISPs will quietly introduce data caps again. Even before this crisis, almost 9% of homes routinely used more than a terabyte of data, and the data caps are a huge moneymaker for the big ISPs that they are not willingly going to give up. During this crisis, a lot of routine functions are going go virtual and I expect a lot of them will stay virtual when the crisis is over. It wouldn’t be surprising a year from now to see 20% of homes routinely exceeding a terabyte of usage each month.

I think these ISPs will be making a huge mistake if they introduce data caps a few months, or even a year from now. Millions of people found themselves unable to work or school from home due to poor broadband. In the current environment a big public outcry against bad ISP behavior has a high chance of bringing Congressional action. Almost nobody, except the most partisan politicians would vote against a bill that bans data caps. The ISPs should be afraid of other restrictions that might come along with such a bill.

T-Mobile Needs to Step Up

The T-Mobile Sprint merger became official on April 1. Since we are in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, the country needs T-Mobile to keep a few of the promises it made that were contingent upon the merger.

First, T-Mobile promised to offer wireless home broadband immediately after the merger for 50% of the people in the US, including many rural subscribers. T-Mobile envisions packaging excess cellular capacity as home broadband, at a reasonable price. The company does not envision putting fixed wireless antennas on homes like the products of AT&T and Verizon. The T-Mobile home product just requires a billing change where people pay less for cellular data usage inside their home. T-Mobile could effectuate this product almost immediately. This product could immediately help millions of homes that are struggling without affordable broadband right now.

The other T-Mobile promise addressed the digital divide and the company promised to serve 10 million homes that don’t have broadband today. This offer came with a promise to provide free devices to homes to receive the broadband. This is a digital divide product and could bring relief to poor households struggling with students trying to work from home. The product had a catch, in that annual usage was limited to 100 GB for free – but that’s enough usage to get students through the rest of this school year. As cellular plans in general go that’s not bad, meaning a monthly data allowance of over 8 GB per month in data allowance.

If T-Mobile is brave enough to launch these products immediately, they will reap mountains of marketing goodwill, which is exactly what the newly merged company needs. They will have created millions of fans who likely would become loyal to the company for helping them during this pandemic.

If T-Mobile doesn’t step up, ideally the FCC would turn the screws hard to make the company meet these promises now, rather than years from now. However, these plans involve broadband data and the feckless FCC has written themselves out of the broadband business. The FCC can huff and puff, but they no longer have the power to blow anybody’s house down.

Unfortunately, the history of the telecom industry is full of broken promises made as part of mergers. One of the biggest wireless mergers in the past was the 2005 merger of Sprint with Nextel. The companies had promised that the merger would allow them to bring Nextel’s popular ‘push to talk’ technology everywhere. The companies also promised they would blanket the country with cellular data, including rural America, using the 2.5 GHz spectrum. None of those promises ever came to pass – which was perhaps the first of many broken promises made for rural broadband. Like with most mergers, this merger also promised a lot of new jobs, but instead cut jobs.

There are plenty of other failed mergers. Consider the 2011 merger of Comcast with NBC Universal. Comcast promised it would offer affordably-priced standalone Internet everywhere – a product that was created but never marketed. Comcast promised to not discriminate against other programmers, but immediately disadvantaged Bloomberg by moving it to an obscure part of the channel lineup since it competed against the newly acquired MSNBC and CNBC. Comcast also promised to not discriminate against rival streaming services, but soon after the merger implemented its data caps, which applied to everybody’s video except Comcast’s.

One of the most blatant examples of carriers that tossed away pre-merger promises came after the 2006 merger of AT&T and BellSouth. Almost none of the promises made were kept. For example, AT&T promised to bring affordable broadband to all rural customers in the 22 states served by the two companies. Ask the folks in Mississippi and Alabama if this promise was fulfilled. AT&T has promised to build wireline networks in at least 30 cities outside its footprint and compete for voice and data – but this never happened. The companies promised to spend $16.5 billion to upgrade broadband in California and instead shut down expansion soon after the merger. The company claimed it would spend $1 billion wiring schools and libraries – another promise never met.

T-Mobile has an opportunity right not to become a legend in the industry by aggressively bringing affordable broadband to the students and workers who were sent home without broadband. This would distinguish them for the next decade as the carrier that met its promises and would likely propel them into the number one position in the industry. Let’s all hope they step up and do what they promised and do it quickly. Unfortunately, history has shown us that pre-merger promises are often forgotten before the ink is dry. But it would be so refreshing to see a company do what it promised, so we can hope.

Broadband Stats for 2019

Leichtman Research Group recently released the broadband customer statistics for the end of 2019 for the largest cable and telephone companies. Leichtman compiles most of these numbers from the statistics provided to stockholders other than Cox, which is estimated.

The numbers are lower than broadband customers these same companies report to the FCC, and I think that most of the difference is due to the way many of these companies count broadband to apartment buildings. If they provide a gigabit pipe to serve an apartment building, they might count that as 1 customer, whereas for FCC reporting they are likely to count the number of apartment units served.

4Q 2019 2019 Change % Change
Comcast 28,629,000 1,407,000 5.2%
Charter 26,664,000 1,405,000 5.6%
AT&T 15,389,000 (312,000) -2.0%
Verizon 6,956,000 (5,000) -0.1%
Cox 5,170,000 110,000 2.2%
CenturyLink 4,678,000 (134,000) -2.8%
Altice 4,187,300 71,900 1.7%
Frontier 3,500,000 (235,000) -6.3%
Mediacom 1,328,000 64,000 5.1%
Windstream 1,049,300 28,300 2.8%
Consolidated 784,165 5,195 0.7%
WOW 781,500 21,900 2.9%
Cable ONE 773,000 39,000 5.3%
TDS 455,200 31,800 7.5%
Atlantic Broadband 451,463 25,857 6.1%
Cincinnati Bell 426,700 1,100 0.3%
101,222,628 2,525,052 2.6%

Leichtman says this group of companies represents 96% of all US broadband customers. For the year these large ISPs collectively saw growth that annualizes to 2.6%.

The customer additions for 2019 for these large ISPs are just slightly higher than customers additions for 2018. The cable companies performed a little better in 2019 while the losses continue to accelerate for the big telcos. The big telco losers for the year are Frontier, which lost 6.3% of its customer base, AT&T (lost 2.0 %) and CenturyLink (lost 2.8%). AT&T claims to have added 1.1 million customers to fiber for the year, so they are still losing a lot of customers on DSL. Frontier is a total disaster and there may be no recovery for the company if they keep losing broadband customers at a pace of over 6% annually.

‘                                        2018                 2019

Cable Companies        2,987,721        3,144,657

Telcos                           ( 472,124)        ( 619,605)

Total                             2,425,597        2,525,052

The two best-performing companies were again Comcast and Charter, which each added over 1.4 million customers for the year while the rest of the ISPs, including cable companies, collectively lost half a million customers.

One note on the above numbers – the TDS and Cable One numbers include adjustments due to small acquisitions).

The Greed of the Programmers

If you use social media you may have noticed a flurry of activity at the end of December warning that small cable TV providers across the country could lose the Fox channels on January 1. That includes Fox News, Fox Business, FX, National Geographic, FS1, FS2, and the Big Ten Network. The dispute was with NCTC, a cooperative that negotiates rates for most of the smaller cable companies in the country.

Fox was asking for what has been described as a 20% rate hike on programming. Fox was seeking a big rate increase to recognize that they have the number one network on cable TV with 1.5 million daily viewers. NCTC finally struck a deal with Fox on December 31 and the channels didn’t go dark – but the cost of buying the Fox networks went up substantially. Back in September, the Fox channels went dark for ten days on Dish Networks when the satellite company refused to accept the same big rate increase.

This is not the first big rate increase from Fox. ALLO Communications, a sizable fiber overbuilder, says that Fox has raised rates 800% since 2004, To put that into perspective, the cost of living in the US has increased by 36% since 2004.

The Fox rate increase is the perfect metaphor for the woes of the cable industry. Fox is not unique, and during the 2000s most cable programmers raised rates much faster than inflation. Cable companies have had little choice but to pass the rate increases along to customers. The programming cost increases have led to a steady annual rate increase for consumers. The soaring price of cable has led to the cord cutting trend and customers are bailing from traditional cable TV by the millions and at an increasing pace.

As a whole, traditional cable TV has probably now entered what economists call a death spiral. Most programming contracts are for 3 – 5 years and the cable TV companies already know of the big programming cost increases coming for the next few years. As cable companies keep raising rates they will lose more customers. The programmers will likely try to compensate by raising their rates even higher, and within a short number of years, cable TV will cost more than what most homes are willing to pay.

A company like Fox can weather the storm of disappearing cable subscribers since they know that all of the online alternative networks like Sling TV, YouTube TV, and others will carry their major networks like Fox News, Fox Business, and the sports networks. The chances are that the primary Fox channels will be solid and steady earners for the company far into the future. However, the same can’t be said for many cable networks.

The online cable products have far smaller channel lineups than traditional cable. There are more than 100 traditional cable channels that are losing subscribers from cable companies and not replacing them with online programming. It’s only a matter of time until many of these networks go dark, as programming revenues won’t cover the cost of operating the network.

It’s easy for people to hate cable companies since that’s who people pay every month. Cable providers like Comcast and AT&T share in the blame since they are both the two largest cable providers and also owners of content. All cable companies share some blame for not yelling bloody murder to the American public for the last decade – and for not fighting back. The cable companies instead started sliding the programming rate increases into hidden fees. However, the fault ultimately lies with the greed of the programmers. These are mostly big publicly traded companies raise rates every year to please stockholders.

It’s no longer good enough for corporations to make money, they are expected to increase bottom line quarter after quarter, year after year. We’ve only been talking about cord cutting for a few years, but the industry has been declining for over a decade. In 2010 there were nearly 105 million subscribers of traditional cable TV, and that number dropped to just over 83 million by the third quarter of 2019. It’s easy to think of cord cutting as a recent phenomenon, but the industry has been quietly bleeding customers for years. Sadly, the programmers are still denying the reality that they exist in a dying industry and are likely to continue to raise rates like Fox just did.

The supply and demand side of any sane industry would have gotten together years ago and figured out a way for the industry to be sustainable. However, the combined greed of the programmers and the big cable companies has resulted in the runaway rate increases that will doom traditional cable. It’s hard to know where the tipping point will be, but we’ll be there when cable networks start going dark – it’s just a matter of time.

Ho, Ho, Holy Rate Increase!

It’s that time of year when customers get an unwanted Christmas present from cable companies in the form of a rate increase. The largest providers – Comcast, Charter, and AT&T have all announced rate increases. A few others like Cox and Mediacom generally announce price hikes in January. Altice typically raises rates in June.

The cycle of raising rates routinely has gone on for so many years that it feels routine. To give some credit to the cable companies, programmers continue to increase the cost of buying content every year. In fact, most programming contracts last 3 – 5 years and annual rate hikes are usually baked into the contracts.

What’s becoming mystifying is why the programmers and cable companies can’t sit down and find a way to control costs. The rate of cord cutting is climbing at a dizzying rate and with each rate increase, the industry is losing millions of customers.

Comcast

Comcast is raising rates on Basic cable, their smallest packages from $30 to $35, a 17% rate increase. The company is also raising the broadcast TV fee from $10 to $14.95 per month, a 50% increase.

Comcast is also raising the rate of Internet access by $3. I’ve been warning for a few years that annual broadband rate increases will become routine, even though there is no underlying cost of offering broadband that can be pointed to in the same manner. The big cable companies are raising broadband rates to increase earnings to satisfy Wall Street. A $3 rate increase may not seem like a lot, but for a company with over 28 million broadband customers, $3 translates to $1 billion to the bottom line.

Comcast also made changes to other fees. For example, the fee for a returned payment (bad check or credit card number) went from $10 to $30.

Charter

The Charter rate increases already went into effect in November. Charter raised the rates on the three most popular tiers of cable TV – Spectrum Select, TV Silver, and TV Gold by $7.50 per month. Charter also raised the rate for the broadcast fee by from $12.00 to $13.50. The company raised the rate on a settop box by 50 cents, from $7.50 to $8.00. A customer with one settop box saw an overall increase of $9.50 per month.

Charter raised the price of its basic Internet package (100 Mbps – 200 Mbps) from $65 to $70.

AT&T   

AT&T announced rate increases that take effect in January. AT&T raised cable rates for customers using U-verse by $3 to $7 per month. The U-family package increases by $3 while the largest U400 package increases by $7. The broadcast TV fee will increase up to $2, depending upon the market. AT&T also will increase the Federal Regulatory Recovery Fee by $0.07, and for the life of me, I have no idea what this is. I’m not aware of any FCC charges on cable TV and this is something AT&T pockets.

AT&T raised rates on DirecTV customers yet again, after having a rate increase in August. The new increases range from $1 per month for basic choice up to $8 per month for the Premier package. AT&T is also raising the regional sports fees by as much as $2, depending upon the market.

The largest rate increase at AT&T went unannounced as the company has decided to cut back and not renew promotional rates. As promotional plans have ended, AT&T is moving customers to full rates. In just the third quarter of this year, DirecTV lost almost 1.1 million customers as customers have balked at paying full rates.

Broadband Still Growing – 3Q 2019

Leichtman Research Group recently released the broadband customer statistics for the third quarter of 2019 for the largest cable and telephone companies. Leichtman compiles most of these numbers from the statistics provided to stockholders other than Cox, which is estimated.

The numbers provided to investors are lower than broadband customers these same companies report to the FCC, and I think that most of the difference is due to the way many of these companies count broadband to apartment buildings. If they provide a gigabit pipe to serve an apartment building, they might that as 1 customer, whereas for FCC reporting they likely count the number of apartment units served.

Following are the broadband customer counts for the third quarter and a comparison to the second quarter of this year.

3Q 2019 Added % Change
Comcast 28,186,000 379,000 1.4%
Charter 26,325,000 380,000 1.5%
AT&T 15,575,000 (123,000) -0.8%
Verizon 6,961,000 (7,000) -0.1%
Cox 5,145,000 25,000 0.5%
CenturyLink 4,714,000 (36,000) -0.8%
Altice 4,180,300 14,900 0.4%
Frontier 3,555,000 (71,000) -2.0%
Mediacom 1,316,000 13,000 1.0%
Windstream 1,040,000 5,700 0.6%
Consolidated 784,151 1,143 0.1%
WOW 773,900 10,420 1.3%
Cable ONE 689,138 7,376 1.1%
Atlantic Broadband 446,137 2,441 0.6%
TDS 437,700 4,300 1.0%
Cincinnati Bell 425,100 (400) -0.1%
100,553,426 605,660 0.6%

Leichtman says this group of companies represents 96% of all US broadband customers. I’m not sure how they calculated that percentage. That implies that there are only about 4 million broadband customers for companies not on this list, and that feels a little low to me.

For the quarter, these companies collectively saw growth that annualizes to 2.4%. This is a significant uptick over the second quarter of 2019 that saw an annualized growth rate of 1.7%.

On an annualized basis the third quarter of 2019 added about the same number of customers that were added for the calendar year of 2018. However, the cable companies are performing better this year while the losses continue to accelerate for the big telcos. The big telco losers for the quarter are Frontier, which lost 2% of its customer base, and AT&T and CenturyLink which each lost 0.8% of their customer base. Following are the annualized changes in customers in 2018 and 2019:

‘                                          2018                2019

Cable Companies        2,987,721        3,317,904

Telcos                            ( 472,124)        ( 895,564)

Total                              2,425,597        2,422,640

Both Comcast and Charter had spectacular quarters and continue to account for most of the growth in broadband, as each company added around 380,000 customers for the quarter. It would be interesting to understand what is driving that growth. Some of that comes from providing broadband to new homes. Some comes from customers converting away from DSL. And some comes from expansion – I know of examples where both companies are building new network around the fringes of their service areas.

Hidden Fees Adding Up

Consumer Reports recently published a special report titled “What’s the Fee?: How Cable Companies Use Hidden Fees to Raise Prices and Disguise the True Cost of Service”. Cable companies have advertised prices for many years that are significantly lower than the actual bills customers see – but the CR report shows that the size of the fees has grown significantly over the last few years.

The report lists several specific examples. For example, the broadcast fee and the regional sports fees at Comcast increased from $2.50 in 2015 to $18.25 currently. The broadcast fee supposedly covers the cost of buying local network channels – ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC. The regional sports fee can cover the cost of channels carrying regional college and pro sports. In both cases, the cable companies never disclose the actual fees they pay that are covered by these fees.

The report shows that Charter increased its broadcast fee three times in the last year, starting at $8.85 in October 2019 to reach $13.50 per month in October 2019.

It’s not hard to understand why customers are confused by the many fees. The report points out that some cable bills have more than a dozen line items, which are a mix of rates for products, external taxes and fees, and these various ‘hidden’ fees – meaning they are usually not disclosed when advertising the products.

In addition to the Broadcast TV fee and the Regional sports fees the report lists the following other fees:

  • Settop box rental fee. This is to recover the cost of the settop box hardware. For many years this fee was around $5 monthly for most cable providers, but this is an area that has also seen big price increases in recent years and the highest rate I’ve seen was $12 per month. This is to recover a settop box, which for small ISPs costs a little over $100, and must cost less for the big cable companies.
  • Cable Modem / WiFi Router. This is the fee with perhaps the biggest range of pricing – some ISPs don’t charge for this while others are charging more than $10 per month.
  • HD Technology Fee. This fee used to be charged by almost every cable company back when they started offering HD channels (a decade ago many channels were offered in both an HD and an analog format). Now that the whole industry has largely gone to digital programming, CR reports the only company still charging this fee is Comcast.
  • Internet Service Fees. This is a relatively new fee that gets billed to anybody buying Internet Access. The report highlights the fees charged by RCN and Frontier.
  • Administrative and Other Fees. These are often fees under various names that don’t cover any specific costs. However, some fees are specific – I just read an article describing a $7 fee to business customers by AT&T in California to recover property taxes.

Consumer Reports collected a number of sample bills from customers and reports that the average monthly company-imposed fees for the bills they analyzed averaged to $22.96 for AT&T U-verse, $31.28 for Charter, $39.59 for Comcast, $40.16 for Cox, and $43.79 for Verizon FiOS. They estimate that these fees could total to at least $28 billion per year nationwide.

To be fair to the cable providers, these fees are not all profits. The companies pay out substantial retransmission fees for local content and pay a lot for sports programming. However, some of the fees like settop box and modem rentals are highly profitable, generating revenues far above the cost of the hardware. Some of the fees like administrative fees are 100% margin for the companies.

Consumer Reports advocates for legislation that would force cable companies and ISPs to fully disclose everything on bills, similar to what happened with the airline industry in 2011 with the Full Fare Advertising Rule. CR believes that the FCC has the authority to require such transparency without legislation.