Charter spotlights growth opportunities around upselling, Rural Digital Opportunity Fund

Charter Communications CEO Tom Rutledge highlighted the company’s potential to upsell broadband customers as data usage grows but noted it didn’t yet feel the need to pursue a rollout of symmetrical capabilities. The broadband provider saw "significant growth in data usage per internet customer” in Q1 2021, stating this had 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. Rutledge spotlighted “a lot” of opportunity to upsell customers to higher service tiers, noting the vast majority of its broadband subscriber base was on its base-level product offering 200 Mbps download speeds. “We haven’t done much of that, really. We do it, and obviously, we satisfy the market, but the bulk of our customer base is at the entry-level speed.” CFO Christopher Winfrey highlighted the potential for additional growth opportunities to spring from its previously announced Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) buildout to 1 million new locations. 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.” Winfrey added “some of these rural communities, by having broadband, can actually have more fill-in or become more suburban-like, which could open up opportunities which aren’t built into our model.”