Comcast and Charter Lost Another 269,000 Broadband Customers Last Quarter. Where On Earth Are They Going?
The cable television industry's cord-cutting conundrum is nothing new. People have been steadily canceling their cable service since 2013, in fact. Cable companies have largely been offsetting this customer attrition by growing the very business that's slowly killing cable TV. That's high-speed internet -- or broadband -- which makes it possible to pipe other sources of video entertainment into your home.
However, cable companies' broadband business is also now hitting a wall. That doesn't mean mere stagnation. Comcast's (NASDAQ: CMCSA) Xfinity internet service shed 110,000 domestic high-speed internet subscribers during the second quarter of the year, plus another 10,000 business broadband accounts. Charter Communications' (NASDAQ: CHTR) Spectrum lost 154,000 residential broadband customers in Q2, only offsetting this loss with the addition of 5,000 new business accounts. In both cases, these subscriber losses extend and accelerate trends that first took shape in the middle of last year.
The data begs one key question: Given that high-speed internet is at the heart of the reason cable television is on the defensive in the first place, where the heck are these broadband customers going?
Source Fool.com
