Comcast's Internet Business Stalled by Housing Slowdown (bloomberg.com) 39
Comcast fell the most in two years after its prized internet business added no new customers last quarter, its worst performance in decades, due to a housing slowdown and heavy competition. From a report: The largest US cable TV provider had added broadband customers in every quarter since at least 2005, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Analysts were looking for around 83,000 new subscribers in the second quarter, and none of them predicted the gain would be in fact, zero. The shares slid as much as 9.9% on Thursday, their biggest intraday decline since March 2020. Rival Charter Communications, which reports earnings on Friday, dropped as much as 7.5%. "We expect the stock to face pressure absent forward-looking comments that suggest an improvement in broadband trends," New Street Research analyst Jonathan Chaplin wrote of Comcast. As home buying slows and competition among fiber and wireless broadband providers intensifies, the prospects of Comcast and its cable peers returning to prepandemic internet growth has become more challenging.
Not due to a housing slowdown... (Score:2, Informative)
Re: Not due to a housing slowdown... (Score:3)
They're monopoly recently broke in my area.
There's a line of site wireless carrier that a lot of people use even though it seems pretty shaky (they're rates are excellent when they're up though, but seem to have outages 2 days/month).
T-Mobile just started offering too, I switched for the much better upstream and some savings, even though it's not real internet (carrier level IPv4 NAT, and won't allow IPv6 through the router).
I don't really need direct internet access anymore though, and for the much better
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I am shocked. SHOCKED.
Contradictory Goals (Score:4, Insightful)
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Quick, let's build more houses so that Comcast can grow next quarter!
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Imagine if Comcast actually started lobbying for up-zoning.
Re: Contradictory Goals (Score:2)
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Investors try to gauge performance using overly broad, and often irrelevant metrics
Investors don't really care about long term stability. Stable market saturation is great for a business - it just doesn't get big rewards for speculative investors.
Recent experience (Score:5, Insightful)
Recent experience, me and wifey got into watching an old series, E.R.
Decided to try a first time purchase of the season through on demand.
We watch the first 7 episodes in about 2-3 days. Now boom they say it's not available but will be "soon". I go through a week of tech calls and troubleshooting and grow tired of this and order the season on DVD instead next-day.
We completed that season and are now on the next and I absolutely learned my lesson (which I already knew but retested in 2022) that buying from them is not only renting, but a poor renting experience at that.
Also if they get some kind of tiff with any companies holding media/movies I have bought, they will just vanish into thin air anyways but my dollars sure never return.
This is bad writing on the wall. I'd rather buy old DVDs and watch them on a player than try to give money to these fools which can't even deliver what I paid for.
ER is on Hulu $15/mo (was Re:Recent experience) (Score:2)
Get a streaming box or stick from Roku, Google or Amazon. They start at around $30. And then subscribe to Hulu, which is $15/mo without ads. They have every episode of ER.
If you do that, you'll likely discover all the other options for streaming content and dump Comcast for less expensive and more flexible offering options.
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Um, no.
We started watching Cheers and Frasier on Hulu a few years back. At some point while still in it, they got dropped. We switched to watching them on Prime. Those got dropped. We switched to watching them on Netflix. (Maybe Netflix and Prime were reversed. It's been a while.) Those got dropped. They were one Peacock for a bit, but we stopped paying attention.
For any show of more than about three or four seasons, you *WILL* hop services to finish it. There's just too much "GIMME IT'S MINE" going on with
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Frasier is one of the greatest sicoms of all time and has held up so much better (once you get to the seasons where he had long hair) than Sienfield.
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Frasier is better than Cheers too. Cheers is fun in a nostalgic way, but Frasier is more open-ended time wise. Cheers was such a product of the eighties.
I still enjoy Seinfeld for what it was, but there's a lot better in the same vein these days. "It's Always Sunny" comes to mind. Dirtbags being dirtbags has really been refined over the decades.
Well, that and.. (Score:2)
A lot of markets are getting credible fiber service from the telco provider, meaning after years of the choices being between rather lackluster DSL and serviceable DOCSIS, so people were stuck with the guys with the RG6 for respectable service.
Now you have cable company with DOCSIS, or *maybe* the cable company ran fiber, competing against:
-Telcos with Fiber that deliver as good as the best possible option the cable company can provide
-Or if DOCSIS has been good enough, cellular service providers can offer
comcast has fiber $300/mo + $15/rent + $1000 insta (Score:3)
comcast has fiber $300/mo + $15+/rent fee for hardware + $1000 install fee
Starlink (Score:2)
A lot of markets are getting credible fiber service from the telco provider, meaning after years of the choices being between rather lackluster DSL and serviceable DOCSIS, so people were stuck with the guys with the RG6 for respectable service.
I think that might be due to Starlink.
The local phone company swore on a stack of bibles that they would deploy fiber in my state in 2001... and did nothing for 22 years.
Now Starlink is going live soon, and everyone is quickly building out fiber to pick up market share in the small towns and cities. Everyone in rural areas will have Starlink, and it will be expensive but much better than any of the alternatives.
Additionally, I suspect (without proof) that if 2 farm houses are near each other, they can have
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-Telcos with Fiber that deliver as good as the best possible option the cable company can provide
And at least in my case around 960/940 speeds at about 2/3 the price Comcast charged for 50/5. We have comparatively light needs for TV/etc streaming (a single 1080p TV) so the download speed increase didn't do much for us. The upload bump definitely helped for my work-at-home case, now the bottleneck is with my employer's VPN configuration. The main reason I switched was the price advantage which was simply impossible to ignore.
I've long wondered when saturation would arrive, and to me this news indicat
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My town was one of those Google threatened to run fiber to. A couple of months later I get a postcard from AT&T offering gig fiber with no caps for what I was paying Comcrap for 80/10 over coax. I did the happy dance when I went to the local Comcrap storefront, handed them back their boxes AND INSISTED ON A RECEIPT for same .Broadband has been solid in the range of 900-940 Mb/s symmetric.
The only drawback has been their "residential gateway" box which does 802.1x auth to their head-end plant so replac
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Google fiber is the same way (can't use my own modem.) But I run the cord staight to my opnsense box and from their my wifi routers with no problem.
It's great having high upload/download speeds. With Time Warner - and I am assuming now Spectrum - I could get half that speed for downloads and a riducloulsy low speed for uploads.
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AT&T does have IP Passthrough if you want to put a router behind it. Not a true bridge mode, but still makes most everything work at full line speeds. Downside is the bad implementation of IPv6, so you can't really pass subnets on from the router behind it. For now, I can still get away with disabling IPv6.
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Yeah, AT&T's BGW320 pisses me off because signal wise, it does fine for me, bandwidth wise it does fine, but:
-No NAT loopback... Ok fine I'll just have local DNS return local addresses for the 'external name', except..
-No DNS customization.. Ok fine, I can disable DHCP on the router and run a DHCP server elsewhere, except...
-If I do IPv6, then the router *forces* it's non-configurable DNS in route advertisement
I kind of like having IPv6, but it's so hardcoded that it screws with my internal setup..
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I'd rather have NAT loopback than IPv6. So passthrough works fine. If it comes to the point of really wanting IPv6, I'll just have to set up a third party IPv6 tunnel of some sort.
We expect the stock to face pressure ... (Score:2)
"We expect the stock to face pressure absent forward-looking comments that suggest an improvement in broadband trends."
This. Is. Hilarious.
"We think it's gonna go down until we say we think it's gonna go up"
Can you believe how much people get paid to say this?
Say what? (Score:5, Insightful)
What competition? There are two choices for broadband where I live: Comcast and Verizon. Both charge nearly identical prices for the same services.
Competition is three or more providers. Not two colluding to keep prices high and speeds slow.
You have choices? (Score:2)
It's Comcast or wireless here, and I'm not in to latency.
Not here! (Score:2)
One! Well, maybe dial-up and satellite but why bother when slow, costly, and unreliable in rural areas?
Great (Score:2)
So that means they have plenty of people they can devote to shoring up their infrastructure. Around here, it seems like if someone just looks at Comcast's equipment the wrong way the service goes down for several hours.
Local Fiber! (Score:1)
Stuck With Comcast (Score:1)
In my area, if you want decent speed, you're stuck with Comcast. Only other option is 6Mbps DSL from AT&T.
Too expensive. (Score:1)
Frankly, comcast has priced themselves out of my price range. Their lowest price these days is close to $100 after taxes.
I can get cheaper internet from TMobile or ATT.
Who wants the extra cost add-ons? (Score:2)
1. People are using their cell phones instead of home phones. So no bundling there.
2. Fewer people are watching regular cable TV. Instead, they're buying things like Disney+, HBO Max, Amazon Prime. So no bundling there.
3 People do want reasonably priced broadband which Comcast doesn't provide.
Case closed.
I left comcast a few months ago (Score:3)
Re: I left comcast a few months ago (Score:2)
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Google came to town with 1-2G up *and* down. Comcast was dumped. Fighting the account termination was the hardest part. It's been about 4 months now and I think the Comcast account is finally dead.
==Comcast was so bad they had to invent another name, Xfinity so they could fool more people into thinking they were a different company.==
If Facebook doing the same thing with Meta? Does everyone hate Comcast *and* Facebook?