Cable’s Broadband Subscriber Dominance Takes Shift in Q2

Cable operators, which have enjoyed subscriber growth for over a decade, saw their fortunes change during the second quarter of 2022 with the largest cable operators seeing either flat or declining growth.

The top cable companies lost about 60,000 subscribers in the second quarter of 2022 – compared to about 840,000 net adds in the second quarter of 2021. Comparably, the telcos lost 88,000 subscribers during the period.

Doug Dawson, the principal analyst at CCG Consulting, said cable’s decline was not unexpected.  

“The cable companies have gained customers every quarter for far longer than a decade, so this net loss for the sector is a big surprise,” Dawson said in CCG’s POTS and PANs column.

Analysts don’t expect cable’s downturn to change much throughout the rest of 2022. “We expect Cable adds to be modestly negative in the second half of the year,” said Jonathan Chaplin of New Street Research, in a research report.

Look at the chart below to see how the cable MSOs performed during the quarter. Broadband Communities developed these rankings from the information in service providers’ earnings reports.