Early February, Charter CEO Chris Winfrey indicated that the cable operator expected to complete its Docsis 4.0 network upgrade in 2026, instead of the originally planned 2025 target date. Charter was supposed to follow in the footsteps of Comcast, which started implementing Full-Duplex Docsis 4.0 to its first customers end 2023. This network upgrade, and the associated promise of multi-gig symmetrical speeds, is usually perceived as a source of optimism for cable operators to regain momentum in the broadband market, after mixed results in 2023. Subscriber growth, a metric of the past for cable operators? Indeed, Charter reported a loss of 61,000 internet subscribers in the last quarter of 2023, while Comcast closed the year with 29,748,000 domestic broadband residential customers, down from 29,812,000 end 2022. This situation applies to the whole cable industry overall, and losing subscribers has become a common phenomenon, not to say the norm. Other operators, like Cable One, follow the same trend. It becomes all the more concerning that connectivity, and especially broadband, had become their core focus, following the decline of their linear video business. The saturation of the market has anyway led operators to increasingly eye a stronger ARPU as the relevant metric to assess the value of their broadband business. Despite the yearly customer loss, Comcast still experienced a 4% growth of its average revenue per user over the period, and that should be the most important metric going ahead. > Nevertheless, cable operators are expected to maintain their dominant market position, and should still account for close to 50 % of the total market by 2028, according to Dataxis’ estimations. Long-term perspectives look more promising, as a result of this upcoming deployment of Docsis 4.0 and as a result of new subsidized broadband projects, through the BEAD (Broadband, Equity, Access & Deployment) Program, allowing cable operators to gain ground, especially in rural areas. To get back on the growth track, cablecos will probably have to pursue this “edge-out” strategy in those rural areas, by rolling out new fiber networks close to their legacy HFC infrastructure, to expand their footprint. At the overall market level, market shares gained by fiber and fixed wireless used to come mainly at the expense of DSL. Indeed, legacy copper networks are doomed to decline, and for instance, AT&T already plans to cut its copper footprint by half by 2025, giving priority to fiber rollout. But fiber and FWA are now increasingly eating cable’s market shares as well, as underlined by Charter CEO Chris Windfrey, with “more persistent competition from fixed wireless and similar levels of wireline overbuild activity.” FWA still with the wind in its sails? The narrative around FWA has been changing over the last...
