October 29th, 2008
Comcast winning broadband scrum vs. telcos
Comcast continues to add broadband Internet subscribers as telecom giants like AT&T and Verizon trail.
Comcast’s third quarter earnings Wednesday tell the tale of a company weathering the downturn pretty well–but not well enough to excite Wall Street. Comcast reported net income of $771 million, or 26 cents a share, on revenue of $8.55 billion, up 10 percent from a year ago. Comcast reaffirmed that operating cash flow would growth 8 percent to 10 percent in 2008.
Here’s the tale of the broadband tape:
- Comcast added 382,000 high-speed Internet subscribers in the third quarter.
- Verizon added 225,000 FiOS Internet subscribers.
- AT&T added 148,000 broadband connections.
Add it up and AT&T and Verizon combined can’t hang with Comcast. More notable is that both AT&T and Verizon are coming off a smaller base and have doubled down on wireless.
So what’s Comcast’s secret sauce? Apparently it’s phone service. Comcast is adding voice customers at a rapid clip. The cable giant added 483,000 voice customers in the third quarter. Comcast’s phone revenue increased 44 percent to $690 million in the third quarter.
On a conference call with analysts, Comcast executives noted that the phone service is the best value that the company has. Comcast appears to be using that voice services as a way to sell other services. However, Comcast also added that it is seeing more competition from AT&T and Verizon so the broadband war is far from over.
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and Smart Planet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet sister site TechRepublic. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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