So-So quarter for Comcast, though the company cannot complain much about its broadband and VoIP phone business. First broadband.
Comcast Cable added 378,000 High-Speed Internet subscribers during the fourth quarter of 2005, and the revenues from broadband business were up year-over-year by 23.9% to $1.1 billion. The price war is not impacting Comcast that much it seems, and the company points out that broadband ARPU remained pretty stable.
At end of 2005, the company had boosted its broadband sales 27.6% to $4.0 billion in 2005, reflecting a 1.5 million or 21.8% increase in subscribers with stable average monthly revenue per subscriber of $42.82. Comcast Cable ended 2005 with more than 8.5 million high-speed Internet subscribers or 20.7% of available homes.
Yup.. the 6 and 8 MBPS tiers are helping keep the competition in check for now. Phone business was pretty good as well. Comcast added about 79,000 phone subscribers in the fourth quarter 2005, bringing the total to about 89,000. Piddly compared to others, but the VoIP service has been slow out of the blocks.
“We have also made great strides in building the foundation that will significantly accelerate our Comcast Digital Voice business in 2006. This in turn will allow us to fully market a bundled offering of voice, video and high-speed Internet products. In 2006 we expect to add at least 3.5 million new revenue generating units, a 35% increase over 2005, including 1 million new Comcast Digital Voice customers.
Oh Crap! Here comes the price hike.
I recently subscribed to Comcast HD and 8 MBPS broadband when my DirecTV receiver fried – boy was THAT a mistake. I pinged several different speed tests and the best connection speed I ever received was 2.4 MBPS – and that dropped to 512 KBPS at 8:00 PM. Between that and the video glitches and poor A to D conversion on my Moto settop box, and the truly heinous DVR softwaew, I switched back to DirecTV (HD, with Tivo) 2 days later. Thankfully, I kept my SBC DSL and am now happily humming along at a CONSISTENT 2.3 MBPS.