Charter’s CEO says that customers “reached an average of about 700 GB per month. He added nearly 20% of its non-video internet customers are now using a terabyte or more of data per month.” Altice USA says, “broadband usage at Altice USA “continues to climb with average use over 600 gig/mo.”” That is why they want caps.
Charter’s CFO says, “While projects like the one it’s undertaking for RDOF have a higher cost per passing and a longer payback period, they can also create “additional building opportunities on the edge of those networks.””
Charter added 355,000 total internet customers in Q1. Consolidated revenue of $12.5 billion was up nearly 7% year on year from $11.7 billion, with net income of $807 million up from $396 million. Internet revenue increased 15% to $5.1 billion. Charter added 2.1 million residential Internet customers in 2020, up from 1.3 million added in 2019. Fourth quarter 2020 residential ARPU (excluding mobile) totaled $111.85
AT&T, Charter and Comcast are losing TV subscribers by the bushel. (see numbers here). It’s okay! In 2020, Charter added 1.3 million mobile lines. Comcast mobile just topped 3.1 Million subscribers. Charter mobile revenue in just 4Q was $428M. Comcast says at 3M the wireless business is now break even.
Comcast also added 461,000 broadbands subs in 1Q2021. Comcast quarterly “broadband revenue grew 12% to $5.6 billion, business services increased 6% to $2.2 billion.”
Commercial revenue increased by 1.0% year-over-year to $1.6 billion, driven by SMB and enterprise revenue growth of 1.1% and 0.9% year-over-year, respectively. [source]
Altice USA passed 1M with FTTH, which is about 20% of its region (Cablevision and Suddenlink). Despite that, not many customers are happy in the Suddenlink territory.
Cable is winning. Period.
Windstream, Fusion and Frontier – all bankrupt. Windstream came out of BK, but its revenue is declining. Frontier is coming out of BK, after cutting “$11 billion in debt and obtained a liquidity of about $1.3 billion. Quarterly revenue came in at $1.68 million, which was down 6.3% from the year-ago quarter.” It is due to a lack of execution AND a poor network design.
Frontier currently has 11.8 million locations that can be served by DSL, and 1.5 million DSL customers. Frontier has 1.3 million existing fiber subscribers (old VZ FiOS mostly in FL, TX and CA) with passing 3.4 million homes and businesses with FTTH. Frontier fiber penetration is currently 41.5%, with a goal to achieve 50% in 2021. [telecomp]
FTR reported 319,000 commercial customers; that fell from 360,000 in Q1 2020; 120K are business fiber broadband customers (low ARPU).
FTR sold its Northwest assets to WaveCapital for $1.3B, which operates it today as Ziply Fiber.
TDS is third in fiber with 307K fiber broadband subscribers [telecomp]
Meanwhile, 2800 WISPs in the US have 6.9 million subs, according to a study by WISPA. Revenues are about $4.4B. That’s about 2500 subs per WISP – with $637 in annual revenue per account and $53 per month.
Last thought: Microsoft Teams now has 145 million daily active users. Many UC providers offer dial-tone to that via Direct Routing or some integration. There isn’t much value in that. It is dial-tone and SMS. Microsoft has Azure CPaaS and Azure for Operators. Some day when they need $500M per month in top line revenue, they will turn on CPaaS for Teams at $6 per month – and take $500 or more million dollars per month away from Calltower, 8×8, RNG, Vonage and the other UC providers who haven’t realized that they are Netscape.
You have to add Value. Or you have to overlay features on Teams. Or you have to replace Teams.
