Comcast and Xfinity Lose Customers - Thanks to Cord-Cutters and Competition from Wireless Internet Carriers (yahoo.com) 98
Bloomberg reports that Comcast's stock price took its biggest drop in over a year on Thursday, "after reporting drops in broadband and cable subscribers, and predicting more losses to come."
Cord-cutting and increasing competition have eroded Comcast's traditional customer base. The company, which owns Xfinity, the NBCUniversal media empire and SkyTV, lost 490,000 cable-TV customers in the third quarter, better than analysts expected but part of an ongoing trend as consumers switch to streaming services like Netflix. It also lost 18,000 broadband subscribers in the quarter, with nearly all of those residential customers. Analysts had predicted Comcast would instead gain 10,900 residential broadband customers.
Shares fell as much as 8% on the news Thursday, their biggest intraday decline since July 2022.
"Growth has halted for Comcast — the largest US broadband provider, with 32 million homes," said Bloomberg Intelligence senior media analyst Geetha Ranganathan. "The company derives 80% of profit from cable, where, even after a pandemic-demand surge, broadband has been hurt by fierce competition and low-move activity among customers." Comcast expects "somewhat higher subscriber losses" in the fourth quarter due to pullback on promotional offers that targeted lower-end customers, Chief Financial Officer Jason Armstrong said on a call with investors. Revenue per customer climbed, however, in part because of price increases and promotions of higher-rate plans.
Broadband is becoming increasingly competitive as mobile providers move into the market with improved wireless internet offerings. In the past week, the Big Three — T-Mobile US Inc., AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. — all reported subscriber gains.
Shares fell as much as 8% on the news Thursday, their biggest intraday decline since July 2022.
"Growth has halted for Comcast — the largest US broadband provider, with 32 million homes," said Bloomberg Intelligence senior media analyst Geetha Ranganathan. "The company derives 80% of profit from cable, where, even after a pandemic-demand surge, broadband has been hurt by fierce competition and low-move activity among customers." Comcast expects "somewhat higher subscriber losses" in the fourth quarter due to pullback on promotional offers that targeted lower-end customers, Chief Financial Officer Jason Armstrong said on a call with investors. Revenue per customer climbed, however, in part because of price increases and promotions of higher-rate plans.
Broadband is becoming increasingly competitive as mobile providers move into the market with improved wireless internet offerings. In the past week, the Big Three — T-Mobile US Inc., AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. — all reported subscriber gains.
Cable sucks, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Wireless internet is not the answer
We seem to have accepted the tradeoff of choosing portability over performance
Wireless electronics is like pipeless plumbing (porta potties). It can be made to work kinda good enough if necessary, but a pipe is always better
We need reliable fiber, not crappy wireless
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Re: Cable sucks, but... (Score:4, Informative)
I used fixed wireless. This is not mobile wireless. We benchmarked it at about 600mbps down and 300mbps up. I pay for 300mbps symmetric. I believe they are using UWB which requires line of site. I was also told they use a sort of mesh topology to relay the signal. The only problems I've had with connectivity hasn't been related to wireless. It was in the ISP data center.
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I see people spouting crap like MpVpRb. Usually they are the
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Can you put a shed at the end of the driveway and get fibre service to the shed? Then run your own fibre down the driveway?
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>the ISP will only drop to a home or commercial building, not a shed or ground box (I asked about that latter
Presumably they prefer the $24K to doing something sensible that takes no additional effort on their part but doesn't net them $24K.
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That would probably cost nearly as much with the need to provision power to the shred, building permits, etc. If the ISP will play ball he SHOULD be able to run his own fiber, for a lot less than $24,000, then use that for their service. You can do the same with cable, I’ve done direct bury with RG11 for long driveways beyond the reach of RG6, then you just have cableco connect into it at the end of the driveway.
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What about if you provide the conduit, would they use it?
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They will not connect to a customer run cable. Again, I already asked. They have to be the ones to run the cable.
That's clearly *technically* not true, unless they insist on running all the cables inside homes too. Just sayin' ... What difference does it make if they connect to your cable in/outside your home? My provider connects in a box I installed on the outside of my house to cable I ran into the house to a splitter and cables I ran to the various rooms. As long as their to your connection is properly grounded it shouldn't make any difference where it is.
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The difference is they will not do it, no matter what pedantic arguments you throw at them, the answer will still be no.
Sure, I get that. Not trying to start a fight. Just sayin' that their "reasons" are disingenuous.
Perhaps, as a hold-over from the past, they're concerned that someone else may tap the cable between the drop and your house and get unauthorized service, though that shouldn't really matter anymore now that all the signals are digital and encrypted, etc...
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The difference is they will not do it, no matter what pedantic arguments you throw at them, the answer will still be no.
Then the solution is to put in a $100 prefab shed at the end of the driveway and tell them to install it there. Run power to the shed if they require it. Then trench and run a 10-gigabit Ethernet link from there to your house. Done.
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This is Slashdot. People will give you 1000 alternative solutions ignoring the ISP's ability to "just say no". Is your provider Nancy Regan ISP Inc?
Re: Cable sucks, but... (Score:2)
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Shed? Just set a post and hang a weatherproof box. It's what a lot of rural people do for power, cable and POTS (copper loop). The fiber people don't like that? Offer to introduce them to the state utilities commission.
Fiber ISPs will probably not serve a piece of customer owned fiber in a ditch or conduit directly from their system. Due to the interference bad termination or cable can cause on their entire system. They can hang their ONT on the post (customer will have to provide a 120V circuit). Then you
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That's what I had in mind. ONT -> SFP -> across the gap --> SFP in the house.
Optic between buildings or between building and posts presents fewer electrical challenges.
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No, they do not.
Also, have you tried....
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Unfortunately fixed wireless isn't an option for me. The local providers all focus on the more rural areas. My options are pay $24,000 to have fiber run down my driveway (900 ft from the poll at the street) or 5G.
Unless you live on a mountain with no soil on top of the solid rock, somebody is trying to con you by about a factor of ten. That's a thousand bucks worth of underground-grade fiber, and you can rent a trencher for a couple hundred bucks per day and you'll only need it for maybe an hour, so under $1k of labor even at California prices. Maybe add a little more if they have to bore *under* the driveway for some reason.
Basically, that's the kind of quote I'd expect if they just don't want to bother, and are
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you can rent a trencher for a couple hundred bucks per day and you'll only need it for maybe an hour, so under $1k of labor even at California prices.
Sure, and I'll have spent $1K running a useless cable since they will not connect to it (I asked about doing this already). And no rock, just clay soil.
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There's the root of the problem.
This isn't a technology issue, or an infrastructure one, it's a legislation problem. The fact they can refuse to connect up to a line on your property that by all accounts complies with all local regulations is completely and utterly bullshit. The power and water companies have no such right, I can hire a licensed contractor of my choice to do my work up until the meter.
This is yet another reason why the last mile of fiber should be municipal.
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Not at all, you need to do what you need for yourself in your circumstances but the OP is correct.
Fiber is better on every front not just for you the consumer but everyone else as well, the issue is availability and the reason for that is not that we don't have the technology or the resources but simply political will. We did it with electricity and then we did it again with phones but for this, arguably the last communication wire we would have to install in this country for probably a century we are sudd
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For most homes, yes, absolutely. You yourself said the line is about 900 feet from your property. If this was a matter of getting power there would no question that you have the right to get it done in a reasonable price. In this era of history I lump internet access right along with electricity, potable water and sewage services. Communications are a vital part of life and a strong case can be made for national and local economic reasons as well as national security.
To be clear I don't want a subsidy, i
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Also I don't believe we can get to 100%, that's just infeasible but let's just get to say 80-90% and then what to do about the last 10-20% will be a lot easier to figure out.
If a house has grid electricity someone got it out there, your power company finds a way to do it profitably, why not an ISP?
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Here in BC, my rural area, 10 acre lots, when the phone company was stringing up the fibre, they were running it to everyone who wanted to sign up for fibre, even the cheap 300/300 plan. In town, they're laying fibre to everyone's house pretty well whether you want it or not, seems being the phone company they have easements rights allowing them to dig up your lawn to bury the fibre.
So basically if you have phone (landline) service, you can get fibre no matter how remote you are, often using the same poles
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Yes. The internet provider should be "subsidizing" those connections from the profits they're making from the easier places to install.
That was the same agreement the Bells agreed to back in the 1900s when they were "mandated" to bring a copper pair to every home in America. We can redo that now.
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Is there anything I can say that won't also get me called a statist clown?
Social Security ; Not only is it effective in reducing elderly poverty, being the most effective method by a big gap, its also very efficient in it's overheads have been less than 1% since 1989.
Effective
https://journals.sagepub.com/d... [sagepub.com]
https://www.cbpp.org/research/... [cbpp.org]
https://www.nber.org/bah/2004n... [nber.org]
Efficient
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS... [ssa.gov]
Before you say "out of funding" it's not, the trust fund is set to run out which is separate f
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Considering the Private sector isn't doing crap at least have my tax money going to the county / state so they do something. Instead we keep giving Tax money to Private companies hoping they will do something.
Their something will always be give me your tax money AND 24K and we might run the wire this century.
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Clear lines of sight between any of the neighbors' houses and yours and less than 500m distance?
Make friends with the neighbor, offer to split their fiber inet costs and setup a point-to-point WiFi bridge. Could probably be done for less than $2k out the door.
Something like a UniFi UBB-XG kit should work well if the distance is less than 500m. We've used a few of them at work for sites where running physical lines was cost-prohibitive due to parking lots, crossing streets, etc. They've worked well.
If the
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I had an uncle that was a developer and an attorn
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How does power, water and (if you have it) copper telephone line or cable tv get to your house?
Fibre should be treated as a utility, same as the others, it's actually easier/cheaper to run than water or power.
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That isn't to say city permits aren't also a form of con, but if that's the case it isn't the service installers to blame.
Sounds like a "Married With Children" episode that I just watched. Srsly.
It involved Al Bundy building an unpermitted & uninspected dog house in his backyard. As if dog houses needed permits and inspections, right?
The permit guy offered to take money, twice or more what a permit costs, to bypass the waiting and the paperwork.
When the permit guy noticed that Al could con money out of a naive foreigner friend so the permit guy turned into the inspector guy and asked for another bribe to shortcut the inspe
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The cable and trencher solution works if there are zero issues. But all they have to do is break one pipe or cut one power line or screw up a permit or run into a nasty stretch of rock and it could cost them thousands to fix. Its a lot of risk to sell you a service for $70/month and support forever if/when issues arise.
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The cable and trencher solution works if there are zero issues. But all they have to do is break one pipe or cut one power line or screw up a permit or run into a nasty stretch of rock and it could cost them thousands to fix.
And this is why before any construction happens, you call and get the utilities marked (which they are required by law to do at no cost to the homeowner). And permits, in the unlikely event that installing a single buried fiber on private property or in a utility easement would even require permits, would be the same whether you're running 50 feet to a house or 900 feet. Running into rock *might* be a risk, depending on where you are, but usually isn't, and when it is, you would likely already have poles
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I mean my house requires more fiber than that but Verizon was like "no problem". Twice. A temp drop then the final drop.
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Saved about $23,000 because I'm not a moron posing as a geek on a geek news site.
Was about to simply point out to you that you had missed the part where EvilSS said "Sure, and I'll have spent $1K running a useless cable since they will not connect to it (I asked about doing this already). And no rock, just clay soil". But then I read your last sentence and felt compelled to add that you're the moron, and an asshole as well.
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Cool story bro. You going to pony up the $24,000 I was quoted to have fiber run down my driveway so I can ditch my 5G home internet?
Wow, not sure what unique challenges make it so expensive for your home, but 5 years ago I was given a quote of about $5k for a home I was planning on buying to run fiber a couple hundred yards. This is in a fairly expensive suburb in the Midwest (most homes $600k-$1M). I knew there was no way I was going to buy a home without wired internet and cable, so I needed to know what I would subtract from my offer. In the end it didn't matter since my wife didn't like the house for other reasons.
The odd thing was
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Farmers grow the food that you eat (Score:2)
The world can't help it if you choose to live out on a farm
First, if nobody chooses to live out on a farm, nobody in the city gets to eat. Second, farmers have to upload data sets to their crop managers. See "Farm tech depends on broadband access" by Kevin Hecteman [bfarm.com].
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We have the same problem with other infrastructure. Telephone lines, roads, water and gas pipes, electricity lines, postal delivery.
All you need is a universal service mandate with the costs spready over all users, and local loop unbundling so that the owner of the line has to make it available to other ISPs at the same cost they charge their own in-house ISP. Then you have universal service and competition to keep prices down.
It's worked well in Europe, where properly implemented.
Re:Cable sucks, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't disagree that we need fiber and it is better, however, you should not be dumping on fixed wireless access using cellular technology. For one, with proper design, it can deliver competitive to DOCSIS speeds. It usually beats it on upload speed.
More importantly, it offers COMPETITION. We watched Cox suddenly stop demanding contracts, lower their prices, quietly stop imposing caps, and start offering free installs again after T-Mobile and Verizon lit up FWA in our city. Previously they only did this if you had one of the lucky few (less than 10% of the metro) addresses that could get AT&T Fiber. They knew where AT&T fiber was, to the address level. One house (with access to it) would get sweetheart deals with three year price locks while the neighbor across the street (no fiber) got a contract, caps, and a higher price.
After T-Mobile and Verizon did FWA the whole metro got these sweetheart deals.
Cable monopolists are running scared because of FWA. That is unquestionably a good thing.
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I just bought a house. Apparently it never had cable, but I'm moving in from 18 years of apartment life and kept what I knew.
I wish I gave wireless a more serious look. While the cable company gave me a refreshed deal (saving me ~$40 a month from what I was paying), they also had to drill a hole in my floor and run an ugly black wire along the back side of my house. After it was done, I had to come in after them and thread it through hooks under the floor joists so that it wasn't just laying in the dirt li
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Cable wins here because cellular coverage sucks in the rural area. Also, no fiber. StarLink is too expensive.
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The way to create competition is to unbundle the last mile. In Europe the cable that runs from the exchange to your house is usually owned by a different company to the one that provides ISP service. Any ISP can pay to access that last mile infrastructure, and pricing has to be the same for everyone.
So in your example Cox would have to allow other ISPs to use their infrastructure on the same basis that they allow their own in-house ISP to. In fact they would probably have to spin off the infrastructure part
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Pipes form natural monopolies, so we can't have nice things because that would be socialism.
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> Pipes form natural monopolies
Not necessarily. My city owns a small-but-growing fiber network, and you can buy service from any of several local ISPs who lease fibers from the city.
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It's nice that your city socialized the pipes.
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Re:Cable sucks, but... (Score:5, Informative)
We seem to have accepted the tradeoff of choosing portability over performance
Performance isn't the issue. I tried T-Mobile's 5G home internet briefly and the speeds were fine (most of the time). The main issues were:
The modem is garbage. Even the most basic features such as reserving static local IP addresses for devices on your home network are absent from the router settings. Attempting to use your own wireless router with their crappy modem results in your network being double NATed.
The connection is high latency. Online gaming is a miserable experience.
You're behind carrier-grade NAT, so you're not running any servers (not that you're allowed to anyway, mind you) and it breaks applications which assume you have a normal IPv4 address.
The TOS is far more weasel-y and restrictive than what you'd get with a wired broadband provider. You're, for example, not allowed to use torrent applications or run servers.
The service level is deprioritized straight to hell, so if the tower you're using is heavily loaded, your speeds will suffer significantly.
Finally, at least for me, the service was exactly the same price as Spectrum's cable broadband service, so there's not even any savings to be had. All you get is the satisfaction that you're supporting a different evil telecommunications company. For my needs, it totally wasn't worth it and I went back to cable broadband service.
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I tried T-Mobile 5G and got 900m/sec as the tower was line of site from my apartment. It was $50/mo uncapped compared to Cox which was $129/mo for the same speed and capped at 1.2TB transfer per month.
Everything you said is true but not everyone needs those features. If you use the internet for IoT, streaming, and web it is a great value. Heck the latency wasn't that bad for gaming, but certainly not optimal.
The only reason I went back to Cox was they kept calling me and eventually offered the same price as
Does T-Mobile NAT IPv6? (Score:2)
You're behind carrier-grade NAT
Does T-Mobile home Internet put both IPv6 and IPv4 behind carrier-grade NAT or only IPv4?
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It puts both behind it (I think), no ipv6 passthrough allowed.
If one wants 2 way internet access they'll need a VPN.
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NAT? No. What they do is refuse to assign anything other than a single /64 to the modem. So you can't actually do much with it if you don't want to use their router box. They then proceed to firewall everything inbound from the internet. So you can't make connections to those addresses anyway. Their box will set up an RA and the v6 network does function, unless you want inbound connections or use vlans etc.. Even Comcast will delegate a /60, and at the moment anyway, a real IPv4.
v4 is on CGNAT with 464XLAT.
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All new or growing ISPs have no choice but to put you behind CGNAT, or charge you (a lot) extra for routable IPv4. The only companies that can provide legacy ip to all their customers are the old incumbent ones like comcast/at&t etc because they have large allocations from years back and a customer base that isn't growing.
This is only going to get worse until we're fully migrated to IPv6.
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I switched to T-Mobile for my home.
It's dramatically better than Comcast cable was.
With Comcast I was getting 15ms ping or so and had 200/5 speed.
That 5 was brutal working from home.
With T-Mobile I get 50/50 reliably and usually 100/80 or so (tested from my phone on wifi), the ping is up to 20-25ms but it's so much more useful.
The big negative is that it is carrier level NAT and doesn't allow ipv6 passthrough even. That's currently not an issue for me, but if it becomes one I'll need to buy a VPN to get an
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Completely correct. The advantage with cable Internet is that it already uses the infrastructure already in place for many years. And cable Internet already can do gigabit speed downloads so you can stream even ATSC 3.0 standard 4K video very easily.
Starting in 2024, Comcast plans to start rolling out DOSCIS 4.0, which offers even more capacity and the ability to do download and upload speeds that are almost the same. DOCSIS 4.0 would be perfect for online gamers who want fast response during gameplay.
Cord cutting for subscription model isnâ(TM)t (Score:2)
In the past people opted for Netflix, prime etc but now they too run ads and starting to creep up to cable pricing (without a broadband option)
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They don't run ads on anything but the cheapest monthly plans. Standard Netflix is $15 per month and Premium is $23. Amazon Prime Video membership (without other Prime features) is $9 per month. Nowhere near cable prices.
Although cable has increased their Internet cost to the point where cutting the cable doesn't matter much if you still use cable for Internet. I pay $122 for Comcast's Gigabit Extra Internet plan, but after my 2 product discount I only pay $60 per month for their Ultimate TV package. This i
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Netflix and Prime run ads on the ad-supported subscription tier.
Good! (Score:1)
We were pretty much stuck with Comcast for the first two years at my current place. In that time our service costs more than doubled. We tried calling to see about getting a better rate or modifying our service but they wouldn't do anything for us. Then fiber came down our street and we ditched Concast first chance we got. My wife used to be a social worker and routinely had to deal with Comcast and their predatory practices towards those with low income. Looking forward to their hopefully inevitable declin
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"comcast and xfinity" (Score:3)
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It's probably two different companies when the gov't comes around handing out subsidies.
You betcha (Score:1)
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Great! (Score:2)
T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon
Just let me know when they plan on providing service to my neighborhood.
Alternative explanation (Score:2)
The cost and hostile customer service are driving customers away.
Re: Alternative explanation (Score:2)
Many COMCAST and XFinity customers locked in (Score:3)
TiVo issues (Score:2)
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It's the economy, stupid (Score:2)
It probably has a lot more to do with people finally starting to realize that inflation is much worse than they thought or wanted to believe and they are taking a long look at where their money goes. When the economy is healthy and people aren't worried about making ends meet, they tend not to scrutinize their expenses even though they should. These days so much of the economy is centered around the subscription business model. Hell, there are even subscription services to tell you what subscription service
All cable companies need to be taught a lesson in (Score:2)
Losing customers.. (Score:2)
Man, given their amazing customer dis-service, constant price increases, and spotty service, I can't imagine why they might be losing customers!
I have to work with Telcom "providers" all around the country for my job. The major ones are an absolute joke. AT&T, for instance, literally blocked one of our numbers so we couldn't call them to get support. And that's for a pretty big BUSINESS customer...just imagine what they do to residential folks.
I say good, I hope every last one of them dies a horrible bu
It's more than just that. (Score:2)
I finally left Comcast when I a fiber provider rolled into my neighborhood offering the internet service I've always wanted.
10gbps fiber. Bi-directional speed. Low cost. No bandwidth caps.
I'm sorry/not sorry that Comcast's inferior options have finally started to cause them to lose share. I hope to never be a Comcast customer again as long as I don't live in an area where they're the only "fast" option.
Good riddance.
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Sadly, that's not exactly a common experience for many, many Americans, especially in many suburb regions and particularly rural areas.
Wish commenters gave general locations (Score:2)
xfinity (Score:2)
"Comcast and ,Xfinity"? Xfinity is just a tradename for Comcast.