Expand / Comcast CEO Brian Roberts at an event in Beijing on October 17, 2019.
Comcast is the largest Internet provider in the US with more than 29.8 million residential broadband customers, but the company’s long streak of adding Internet subscribers every quarter has finally come to an end.
In Q2 2022 earnings announced today, Comcast said it has 29,826,000 residential broadband customers, down 10,000 from Q1 2022, and 2,337,000 business broadband customers, up 10,000 . The total number of 32,163,000 residential and business Internet customers remained unchanged.
Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said the company’s cable division is experiencing “a unique and evolving macroeconomic environment that is temporarily pressuring the volume of our new customers’ connections.” Comcast also lost cable TV and VoIP phone customers in the quarter, but added wireless phone subscribers.
Comcast was still able to increase quarterly broadband revenue compared to the second quarter of 2021 by 6.8 percent to $6.1 billion due to higher average prices and the fact that Comcast has more customers than a year, despite the drop in the last three months.
Comcast’s stock price fell more than 9 percent in trading today despite gains in the NASDAQ, Dow Jones and S&P 500; is down more than 32 percent in the past 12 months. announcement
Zero broadband growth is a first for Comcast
It’s the first quarter in which Comcast failed to gain broadband subscribers, The Wall Street Journal wrote. “A review of the company’s quarterly filings shows that Comcast added at least 100,000 net new broadband subscribers every quarter for the past 20 years, with the exception of a single instance during the 2008-09 financial crisis, when the company gained 65,000 broadband subscribers in the second quarter of 2009,” the article said. This covers the entire period since Comcast’s November 2002 merger with AT&T Broadband.
Although competition from fiber and wireless services was cited as a reason for cable’s stagnation, it was inevitable that Comcast would end up limiting customer growth. After years of rapid customer increases, Comcast has probably signed up almost everyone who wants its service and lives in a household within Comcast’s network.
In many parts of the United States, Comcast is the only viable option for fast home Internet service. There are also people who would like to have cable Internet in areas where Comcast has not deemed it profitable enough to build there, and cases where Comcast refuses to connect a particular address unless the homeowner pays tens of thousands of dollars up front.
Comcast reduced capital spending in its cable division in 2019, devoting less money to network extensions and improvements in the “line extensions” and “scalable infrastructure” categories. But that spending increased in 2020, 2021 and the first six months of 2022.
From January to June this year, Comcast said its cable division’s “capital expenditures rose 2.5 percent to $3.1 billion, primarily reflecting increased investment in line extensions , scalable infrastructure and supporting capital, partially offset by the decrease in investment in customer equipment.”