Charter lowers its 2021 broadband growth forecast after significant slowdown in Q3

Charter Communications scaled back its forecast for broadband net addition growth in the full year 2021 after posting a significant slowdown in subscriber gains in Q3. The company gained 265,000 internet customers across the two segments in Q3 2021, raising its year-to-date total to 1.02 million. The Q3 figure marked a significant year-on-year drop from 537,000 in Q3 2020 and sequential slide from 400,000 net adds in Q2. As Comcast did earlier in the week, Charter executives attributed the dropoff to substantially lower levels of move activity and new household formation. Charter CEO Tom Rutledge indicated the competitive environment wasn’t a factor, stating it “doesn’t appear to be significantly different than it has been…and the effects of lower activity are throughout the marketplace regardless of what the infrastructure we’re competing against is.” Rutledge also highlighted Charter’s network roadmap, reiterating its plans to use a high-split architecture to add capacity and dismissing the idea that it might overbuild its existing cable network with fiber. “We can upgrade our network at way less than it costs to build a fiber platform overtop,” he said. “Fiber works for us on the increment in RDOF, it works for us in certain kinds of MDU environments, certain kinds of greenfield construction environments. But in terms of taking existing infrastructure that we’ve already deployed – three-quarters of a million miles of infrastructure essentially – that we can upgrade at very low costs, orders of magnitude less than it costs to build fiber, and get equal performance and do it quickly.”