Charter Communications Inc Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Charter Communications Inc (NASDAQ: CHTR) Q1 2026 Earnings Call dated Apr. 24, 2026

Presentation

Operator

Hello and welcome to Charter Communications first quarter 2026 investor conference call. We ask that you please hold all questions until the completion of the formal remarks, at which time you will be given instructions for the question and answer session. Also, as a reminder, this conference is being recorded today. If you have any objections, please disconnect at this time. I will now turn the call over to Stefan Anninger.

Stefan Anninger — Senior Vice President, Investor Relations

Thanks operator and welcome everyone. The presentation that accompanies this call can be found on our website, ir.charter.com I would like to remind you that there are a number of risk factors and other cautionary statements contained in our SEC filings and we encourage you to read them carefully. Various remarks that we make on this call concerning expectations, predictions, plans and prospects constitute forward looking statements which are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ from historical or anticipated results.

Any forward looking statements reflect management’s current view only and Charter undertakes no obligation to revise or update such statements. As a reminder, all growth rates noted on this call and in the presentation are calculated on a year over year basis unless otherwise specified. On today’s call we have Chris Winfrey, our President and CEO, and and Jessica Fisher, our cfo. With that, let’s turn the call over to Chris.

Chris Winfrey — President and Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, Stefan. During the first quarter, Spectrum Mobile remained the fastest growing mobile provider in our footprint and we now have over 12 million mobile lines, including an increase of 370,000 spectrum mobile lines in the quarter. That’s 1.8 million new lines over the last 12 months for growth over 17%. We’re pleased with that growth given the continued intensity of mobile subsidies from the three big telcos. In addition, our video customer losses continue to improve year over year. 60,000 loss was less than a third of last year’s first quarter loss, driven by significant product improvements over the past couple of years in Internet competition for new customers remains high and our first quarter Internet customer loss totaled 120,000.

Revenue was down 1% year over year, primarily driven by lower residential video revenue, while residential connectivity revenue grew 0.9% year over year. First quarter EBITDA, excluding transition expenses for the Cox transaction, declined by 1.8% primarily due to a prior year benefit. Cable industry Internet growth has been pressured for several years now given new competition, a challenging housing environment and other factors like mobile substitution. But we remain confident about our ability to win in the marketplace and grow over the longer term.

Ultimately, that confidence in our future success is founded on three building blocks. Our powerful advanced network, our core operating strategy around products and pricing, and our Focus on Improving Customer Satisfaction Starting with customer satisfaction, customers remain the central focus when we make decisions for any product or service and how we allocate our resources. We have an integrated and detailed approach that starts at the highest levels of the organization. Our customer focus is not just cultural, it’s also core to our incentives.

Beyond the obvious, share price incentives, NPS scores and other service related metrics now drive a meaningful part of our overall annual incentive structure. Relentless improvement is also a key component of our approach and that applies to our network capability and reliability products that we offer and to our service. We’re constantly working to improve each of these with examples including new product innovations like our invincible WI Fi and our Anytime upgrade feature for mobile and the dramatic decline we’ve seen in service and trouble calls per customer.

We’ve also deployed new AI tools now used by our service agents, driving higher customer satisfaction and reducing call times with higher job satisfaction for our employees as well. We have a seasoned, very competitive team here at Charter, fully aligned with our shareholders and that team will only get better with the addition of top flight talent from the Cox team and Nick Jeffrey who will join in September. Moving to our Advanced Network Our high capacity network is an unrivaled asset. It offers gigabit speeds and low latency everywhere we operate.

Those capabilities matter long term as customer data usage continues to increase, including in the upstream where we’re seeing 20% annual growth driven by things like self driving cars. Significant increasing upload by the end of this year, about 50% of the current Spectrum network will be upgraded to symmetrical and multi gig service with significant work on the remaining 50% already in flight. By deploying remote OLTs and LoRaWAN transponders, we will have fiber on demand capabilities and fully active telemetry in the vast majority of our footprint, giving us cost and service advantages.

Our network is both wired and wireless in 100% of our footprint. You can get mobile from us wherever we offer our gigabit speeds and vice versa. And with our expanding hybrid M and O capabilities using CBRS and WI Fi in conjunction with the Verizon mobile network, we are driving our seamless connectivity advantage that is the basis for Spectrum Mobile’s fastest overall mobile speeds. In addition, our network is both fiber based and powered to its edge, which means it can uniquely provide enhanced wireless opportunities that we haven’t pursued yet.

If you think about our ubiquitous deployment of multi gig unique seamless connectivity capabilities with low latency Edge Compute and the potential for fiber powered DAs, nobody has the set of assets that we do you see us demonstrating those capabilities with early deployments of immersive content with spec in front row, authenticated offload for AWS and likely extending that to increasingly autonomous vehicles? We’re also deploying other B2B products with edge cache and GPU. As a service, our network and data assets really lend themselves to future B2B and B2C applications which require proximity and low latency under 10 milliseconds, which we now provide.

Our industry has always excelled at finding new products and customers for our key assets. Our core operating strategy remains unchanged, offering great products at the best value with continuously improving service. And that service is uniquely delivered by our 100% US based employees 24 by 7 with the customer commitment supported by Money Back guarantees, that core operating strategy has served us well. It fueled our organic and inorganic growth from Legacy charter in 2013, which is 5 million customer relationships, to charter today with nearly 32 million customers and now pro forma for the Cox transaction with over 70 million passings.

We take the responsibility that we have to our local communities personally and it’s reflected in our operating strategy. With those three building blocks in place, I want to turn to what we’re doing day to day right now to win in an increasingly converged market. Our competitors are all talking convergence, but we uniquely provide it now and in the future. Slide 5 of today’s presentation clearly shows that we offer more for less than our competitors. Our results don’t yet reflect that reality given the legacy reputation of cable, so we remain focused on clearly messaging and delivering our superior value, utility and service to both new and existing customers.

And we’re doing that in different ways. We launched our $1,000 savings guarantee in February, which demonstrates the value we deliver in a very clear way. If you sign up for Spectrum Internet and switch two or more mobile lines from Verizon, AT&T or T mobile, we guarantee $1,000 of savings in your first year or we’ll cover the difference. We also recently launched a new digital buy flow for online channel. It better demonstrates our bundle value and savings versus competitors and the new buy flow is achieving better yield.

We’re also actively migrating our existing base of customers to our newer pricing and packaging, giving them more product including Internet, speed increases and mobile for the same price or slightly more than they’re paying so they get more value, creating higher satisfaction and reducing their propensity to churn. Roughly 45% of our residential customers are now in the pricing and packaging launched in late 2024. With respect to providing superior utility over 50% of our expanded basic video customers have activated at least one of our included streaming apps, with those activating taking nearly four streaming apps on average.

Customer Churn for expanded basic customers who activate is 1/3 lower and it is meaningfully lower across all customer tenure. Keep in mind that nearly all video customers are also broadband customers, so that’s a big help. We also launched our new Invincible Wi Fi router in February which effectively guarantees connectivity when a home or business loses power. Invincible Wi-Fi’s battery unit keeps the router running. It also comes with the backup 5G cellular connection, keeping customers online without interruption if a network disruption occurs.

The upgrade and attach rate was much higher than expected and we’ve had to prioritize our supply to a smaller audience until we get the right level of supply. It’s a little frustrating short term, but Invincible Wi Fi is a great way to add utility to our service which improves quality, lowers churn and earns more revenue. It’s a great example of an innovation that provides better utility to our customers. In mobile, we have the most value rich plans in our footprint, a market leading anytime upgrade program, the most valuable repair and insurance plans, and the best international service plans around.

In service, I’ll simply highlight what we’ve talked about previously, our continuous service improvements through telemetry improvements with their network upgrades, the use of AI in the network and frontline employee tools, same day service and installation guarantees. Often we’re at your doorstep in an hour and a commitment to a U.S. based service agent. We are America’s Connectivity company. Before I turn things over to Jessica, I just wanted to provide a brief update on where we are with the Cox transaction.

We’ve now received all the necessary federal and state approvals that we need to close, except from California, and we’re working with the California Public Utilities Commission towards the summer close. Within a couple months of closing, we will launch the Spectrum brand and our pricing and packaging within the legacy Cox footprint. Our focus as always will be on product penetration and customer ARPU, not single product ARPU and of course growing free cash flow per passive. Fox’s low mobile and video penetration rates are major opportunities and that’s what’s going to assist us in migrating the customer base to our pricing and packaging in an efficient manner.

That’s something we’ve done successfully several times before, including with Time Warner Cable, Brighthouse and Bresnan Net charter in both 2013 and the last 18 months. Really? In addition to benefiting from better mobile and video products, the Cox communities will benefit from lower promotional and retail pricing, sales channel expansion including field sales and stores and our very complementary B2B capabilities which will help accelerate growth of both Cox and Spectrum business. As part of the acquisition we’re picking up talent which we expected and unexpected capabilities in B2B and network AI and we’re stepping into a very high quality network asset.

The Cox network has been very well maintained with robust investment through the years. Cox’s mid split process is nearly complete and it gives us plenty of competitive Runway to implement high Split and DOCSIS 4.0. After we finish those projects within the current Spectrum footprint, we can then make that move at lower cost at faster speed. That’s what was included in our original plan, although we don’t have to rush it. So we’re looking forward to the completion of our multi year investment programs, the near term actions to win in our current footprint and the pending Cox closing and driving growth in that footprint that now Pass it over to Jessica

Jessica Fischer — Chief Financial Officer

Thanks Chris Please note that any forward looking financial or customer information that we provide in today’s discussion or presentation does not include Cox or any transition costs related to Cox integration planning. Let’s please turn to our customer results on Slide 8 including residential and small business, we lost 120,000 Internet customers in the first quarter driven by lower connects year over year partly offset by slightly lower churn. The operating environment for new sales in particular Internet continues to be competitive.

We continue to see expanded fixed wireless competition and higher mobile substitution as well as ongoing fiber overlap growth at a rate similar to prior quarters. But we I would point out that we also continue to have higher market share than our competitors even in mature fiber markets. Collectively that drove first quarter Internet sales lower year over year. Churn improved year over year and Internet churn including non paid churn remains at very low levels. In mobile we added 368,000 lines with higher gross additions year over year, more than offset by higher disconnects.

Net adds in the quarter were lower due to heavy device subsidy activity by the big telco competitors including the iPhone. 17 video customers declined by 60,000 versus a loss of 181,000 in 1Q25 with the improvement primarily driven by much lower video downgrades and customer churn year over year resulting from the new pricing and packaging we launched in late 2024. Zumo and the Seamless entertainment product improvements including our Programmer streaming app inclusion packaging, new connects and upgrades to our fully featured video package with apps were up year over year.

Wireline voice customers declined by 174,000 with the year over year improvement primarily driven by lower churn in rural we continue to see strong customer relationship growth generating 41,000 net customer additions in our subsidized rural footprint in the quarter. Subsidized rural passings grew by 89,000 in the first quarter and by over 483,000 over the last 12 months which is in addition to our continued non rural construction and fill in activity. Moving to first quarter revenue results on slide 9 over the last year residential customers declined by 1.5% while residential revenue per customer relationship declined by 1.4% year over year.

Given the growth of lower priced video packages within our base $218 million of costs allocated to programmer streaming apps and netted within video revenue versus $47 million in the prior year period and a decline in video customers during the last year. Those factors were partly offset by promotional rate step ups, rate adjustments and the growth of spectrum mobile lines excluding the programmer streaming app allocation. Headwinds to Residential Revenue Residential revenue per customer relationship grew by 0.3% year over year as Slide 9 shows.

In total, residential revenue declined by 2.7% and it was down by 1.1% when excluding costs allocated to streaming apps embedded within video revenue in both periods. Turning to commercial Total commercial revenue grew by 1% year over year with mid market and large business revenue growth of 2.1% and when excluding all wholesale revenue, mid market and large business revenue growth grew by 2.8%. Small business revenue grew by 0.2% reflecting year over year growth in revenue for small business customer of 0.9%, mostly offset by a year over year decline in small business customers of 0.7%.

First quarter advertising revenue grew by 5.3% given higher political revenue year over year. Excluding political Advertising revenue declined 3.4% year over year. Other revenue grew by 14.2% driven by higher mobile sales. Mobile device sales and in total consolidated first quarter revenue was down 1% year over year but increased 0.1% when excluding advertising revenue and programmer app allocation. Moving to operating expenses and adjusted EBITDA on Slide 10 in the first quarter, total operating expenses decreased by 0.2% year over year.

Programming costs declined by 9.3% due to $218 million of costs allocated to programmer streaming apps and netted within video revenue versus $47 million in the prior period, a higher mix of lighter video packages and a 1.3% decline in video customers year over year which was partly offset by higher programming rates. Other cost of revenue increased by 11.4% primarily driven by mobile service direct costs, higher mobile device sales and higher advertising sales costs given higher political revenue cost to service customers, which combines field and technology operations and customer operations decreased 1.4% year over year primarily due to lower labor costs.

Marketing and residential sales expense declined by 3.2% year over year due to lower marketing expenses and labor expense. Transition expenses relating to the pending cox transaction totaled $24 million in the quarter. Finally, other expense grew by 5.3%, primarily driven by one time benefits of $75 million in 1Q25 adjusted EBITDA declined by 2.2% year over year in the quarter and declined by 1.8% when excluding transition expenses. Turning to net income, we generated a bit under $1.2 billion of net income attributable to charter shareholders in the first quarter compared to a bit over $1.2 billion in the prior year period, primarily driven by lower adjusted EBITDA year over year, partly offset by lower other operating expense.

Given our non cash La Laker RSN balance sheet write down in the prior year. Turning to slide 11, first quarter capital expenditures totaled $2.9 billion, $456 million higher than last year’s first quarter driven by timing of spend with higher network evolution spend which lands in upgrade rebuild spend and higher CPE driven by new Wi Fi 7 routers in our new invincible WI FI unit, we continue to expect total 2026 capital expenditures to reach approximately $11.4 billion. Looking beyond 2026, we expect total capital spending in dollar terms to be on a meaningful downward trajectory and after our evolution and expansion capital initiatives conclude our run rate capital expenditures should be below $8 billion per year.

Just to highlight that reduction in capital expenditures on its own from approximately $11.7 billion in 2025 to less than $8 billion in 2028 is equivalent to over $28 of free cash flow per share based on today’s share count. If we take consensus 2026 free cash flow and substitute our expected 2028 CAPEX for 2026 CAPEX, our current stock price would imply a free cash flow multiple of only about 3.8 times and a free cash flow yield of over 25%. Turning to first quarter free cash flow on slide 12, first quarter free cash totaled $1.4 billion, about $200 million lower than last year given accelerated timing of capital expenditures in the year, lower EBITDA and higher cash paid for interest year over year, partly offset by a less unfavorable change in cable working capital.

Turning to cash taxes first quarter cash taxes totaled $64 million. We continue to expect that our calendar year 2026 cash tax payments will total between 500 and $800 million. We finished the first quarter with $94 billion in debt principal. Our weighted average cost of debt remains at an attractive 5.2% and our current run rate annualized cash interest is $4.9 billion. During the quarter we repurchased 4.3 million charter shares totaling $963 million and an average price of $225 per share. As of the end of the first quarter, our ratio of net debt to last 12 month adjusted EBITDA remained at 4.15 times and stood at 4.22 times pro forma for the pending Liberty Broadband transaction During the pendency of the Cox deal, we plan to be at or slightly under 4.25 times leverage pro forma for the Liberty transaction.

Following the close of those transactions, we will target the low end of the 3.5 to 3.75 times range which we expect to achieve within three years following close. Even with this delevering, we continue to expect significant ongoing capital returns to shareholders. Before turning the call over to Q and A, I want to make a few comments regarding our pending POX transaction. We now estimate transaction synergies or run rate operating expense synergies of at least $800 million and are likely to grow that further. Those estimates do not include the benefits of applying Charter’s operating strategy to create revenue and operating cost synergies over time or capex savings. We believe those operating synergies will also be significant. Turning to our reporting plans, I wanted to give you a brief preview on how we expect to report and to mention a few things to better navigate our post close results.

Our first post close results will reflect a full quarter for Legacy Charter plus a stub period for Legacy Cox. So year over year actual comparisons won’t be helpful, but we intend to present Charter’s quarterly trending schedule with pro forma data along the lines of what you receive today. Going forward, we will report similar customer PSU and revenue data for both legacy entities for several quarters following close, both separately and on a consolidated basis. This approach will allow you to track the development of both Legacy Legacy Charter and Legacy Cox.

We will not show expenses or capital expenditures by legacy entity. That’s not really practical given the shared nature of key large items like programming overhead and significant centralized capital spend. We will also continue to report transition expense and capital related to the integration and we’ll provide updates on certain items, including estimates for the synergies we have realized so that you can better isolate the organic growth of the business. At close, our outstanding share count will increase as we will issue the equivalent of just over 46 million charter shares to Cox Enterprises comprised of common and preferred partnership units, partly offset by net charter share reduction of about 6.8 million shares associated with the Liberty Broadband transaction.

That 6.8 million figure is lower now than when we announced the Liberty Broadband transaction, primarily due to our ongoing share repurchases from Liberty Broadband. If we had closed on March 31, our standalone share count at close on an as converted as exchanged basis would have been about 179 million. We will provide additional post close reporting updates as we get closer to close and with that I’ll turn it over to the operator for Q and A.

Question & Answers

Operator

Thank you. At this time, if you would like to ask a question, please click on the Raise hand button, which can be found on the black bar at the bottom of your screen. When it is your turn, you will receive a message on your screen from the host allowing you to talk and then you will hear your name called. Please accept Unmute your audio and ask your question. As a reminder, we are allowing analysts to ask one question today. We will wait one moment to allow the queue to form. Our first question will come from Sean Difley with Morgan Stanley.

You may now unmute and ask your question.

Sean Diffley

Great. Thanks very much, team. Can you hear me?

Chris Winfrey — President and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. Hey Sean.

Sean Diffley

Hey guys. So clearly the focus is on getting the Cox deal done. And thank you for the updates on synergies and timing with California puc. But I was curious your assessment on the potential for further cable M and A from a regulatory standpoint. Obviously the fcc, when reviewing the Cox deal, mentioned increasing competition from the likes of fixed wireless and satellite. So I’m curious how you’re framing your ability and willingness to do more meaningful consolidation from here in the cable sector.

Chris Winfrey — President and Chief Executive Officer

Sure. Look, first and foremost make it clear I’m not commenting on any particular company or assets, but I think as everybody knows, we like cable as an investment. I think it’s a great business. We’d like to acquire more cable assets if it can be done in an appropriate price conditions and the size of the transaction depends on we’ll drive higher synergies. When you hear Jessica talked about the synergies inside of Cox, you can kind of flex that up and down based on the size. I think when you step back and take a look at the environment from a regulatory perspective and Each deal is unique and you have to brush it in its own way.

But in the end we’re just regional competitors with other cable. Each of the cable companies is a regional competitor. We don’t have overlap and all of us are competing against national and global competitors. That’s never been the case more than it is today. When you think about fiber overbuilt, when you think about national telcos with both wireless, mobile, wireless, fixed wireless access, fiber overbuilt themselves in many cases we think about the video space which is really global competition and each element of the space that we operate in, it’s, it’s much more competitive than it was, you know, five or certainly 10 years ago.

I think the charter operating strategy, when you think about the benefits that we provide, you know, in transactions like Cox or we did a Time Warner Cable bright house, the operating strategy, it’s been good for customers and it’s been good for employees. And we’ve demonstrated that it’s not just a something that we say at the time of an acquisition, it’s actually been delivered 100 US based lower pricing for retail and promotional pricing. And we’ve been innovative new products, we’ve used that scale to improve the quality of the service and the products.

So it’s helped us to be a better competitor and a better service provider against national and global competitors. And I think there’s a significant rationale. But there’s nothing that we’re looking at today or doing today other than just finishing the Cox transaction. But I think the opportunity is there to do more over time and we’ll evaluate it when it’s available.

Stefan Anninger — Senior Vice President, Investor Relations

Thanks, Sean. Operator, we’ll take our next question.

Operator

Your next question will come from Craig Moffett with MoffettNathanson.

Craig Moffett

Hi, thank you. Can you hear me? So let’s start. Let’s stay with the, the Cox transaction for a second. Once you close you, you’re now running in your own standalone business about flat year over year broadband arpu. There’s been a lot made of, of the fact that char that Cox’s broadband prices and, and therefore its broadband ARPU is significantly higher than yours. How do you think about the, of how quickly you can move those customers onto spectrum pricing? And so what does that look like as you give those generally more attractive offers to Cox customers?

Chris Winfrey — President and Chief Executive Officer

Sure. Look, you’re right. The broadband ARPU is higher than ours, you can see that. But also the customer ARPU is actually not that different. And so I think that’s the place to focus on is what’s the Customer ARPU going to do over time and you know, the margin at a household level. So, you know, clearly the broadband standalone pricing, which is part of the rationale for getting the deal done, is broadband pricing is going to be lower both at promotional and retail and the broadband reported ARPU for Cox is going to go down.

Our goal is to use video and mobile, given the super low penetration that exists to those products at Cox, to make sure that the customer ARPU is intact and can potentially, you know, likely increase over time, tend to drive margin in there. And so as a result, you know, what you’ll end up with is, you know, a financial profile and a trajectory that’s being preserved based on providing more value into the household. You know, the churn rate at Cox is, you know, higher than ours. So I think we have a real opportunity to drive benefits there.

I think entering into the market. Greg, with a. It doesn’t. The Cox name is great. Spectrum I think is a great name. It’s not, you know, one over the other. It’s that you will have a new name in the marketplace in these markets with lower broadband pricing at retail and promotion with a free mobile line for a year that doesn’t exist today with the fastest mobile product in the country at the lowest price really for anything of that scale and a video product that is fully developed, meaning, you know, in the Spectrum footprint.

We came out with Spectrum TV app, it’s improved over time. It didn’t have pause live tv, it didn’t have cloud DDR at the beginning. All that exists today. It exists with seamless entertainment in a way that’s now easy to activate, which wasn’t the case before. So in the Spectrum footprint those, those products including mobile and video just continue to get better. And here we’re going to enter into Cox footprint with a big bang new name, great way to save money both at retail and promotion for broadband.

Excellent mobile and video products that are fully developed and brand new in the marketplace. I think we’re going to make a splash because we’re new now that doesn’t go on for a. Your service reputation has to earn that. So, you know, is that a two year tailwind where you’re going to have much higher sales because you are new and because you’re providing all this additional product and pricing and value That’ll be the case. We’re going to have field Salesforce that don’t exist today. We’re going to have service hours that don’t exist today.

We’re going to develop the insourcing capabilities in US based workforce that can do same day installs and same day service in a way that doesn’t exist today. And we have the opportunity to earn a brand new service reputation in that market and have long term growth. All of which to go back to. Your question means that you can have higher sales of broadband, you can have lower churn of broadband, you can have a significantly higher attach rate for mobile and video that preserves your overall customer margin and have more operating and capex cost synergies along the way that allow you to fund that growth.

So I think it’s going to be a unique footprint even relative to the standalone charter that you’re looking at today and the pace of migration for the broadband base similar to what we’ve done inside the charter standalone footprint many times and what we did with Time Order cable and Brighthouse. You can pace the migration based on your marketing efforts to your existing customers and how quickly do you put them into loyalty offers and see what’s working and in terms of additional product attached to offset some of the lower pricing that we’re introducing into the market.

So I feel really good about where we’re going to go and we’re just waiting to be able to bring that type of benefit and those savings into not just California. California is about a fifth of the overall Cox customers, but we have orifice of the footprint that is patiently awaiting. We’re excited to get going and bring those benefits to the California customers and to the customers across the rest of the country.

Jessica Fischer — Chief Financial Officer

Thanks Chris. I’d add one more just numerical item to that Craig, as you’re thinking about it, I mean Chris said that the average revenue per customer is not that different from where we sit. The other kind of interesting thing is that the EBITDA margin is also not that different from where we sit today. Even though broadband makes up a much larger portion of their revenue than it does of ours, which might have lent itself to different cost profiles. So we have some space if we move the operating cost structure to look more like ours over time and in particular as you move it that way, recognizing that it’s a marginal additional business rather than an entire business that you have to fully sort of replicate an overhead structure for, there’s plenty of space to then create room for that, that change that you make in the revenue stream over time as well.

Chris Winfrey — President and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, I’m going a different direction. Everything that we just talked about really is on the residential side, but I mentioned it in the prepared remarks. I think one of the real pleasant surprises we’ve had Many pleasant surprises in evaluating the Cox assets and getting to know the team even better. But the B2B capabilities are entirely complementary if you think about from Cox has best in class hospitality capabilities. They have the longest service reputation, B2B across the country for cable operators.

They have products that’s in some cases with rapid scale that we don’t have. And the hope is that we can deploy that across our existing base and we have scale in spectrum business that can benefit the Cox footprint, but also can apply the things that they do really well and apply that across a much broader footprint. Even in hospitality. If you think about what they do in Las Vegas and applying that across New York, Louisiana, Orlando and Dallas, all of our major markets, I’m pretty excited. And we’re going to have a big nucleus of the Cox team that’s really helping and driving that part of the business to higher growth for both Spectrum business and Cox of what exists today.

So not our biggest portion of our overall revenue base, but I think it’s going to be a big revenue contributor for both of the current operations.

Stefan Anninger — Senior Vice President, Investor Relations

Thank you. Thanks, Craig. Operator, we’ll take our next question.

Operator

Your next question will come from Vikash Harlalka with New Street Research.

Vikash Harlalka

Hi, thanks so much for taking my question. I have a 2 parter on pricing at ARPU. Chris, you were ahead of the curve on pricing strategy when we compare it with your peers. But do you think you’ve pulled all the levers on pricing strategy or are there more pricing changes to come? So as an example, like a five year price lock that Comcast and Optimum have implemented and then on ARPU broadband, ARPU was flattish in one Q. Should we expect an acceleration from here? Thank you.

Chris Winfrey — President and Chief Executive Officer

Sure. And look, we’re always, we like our pricing and packaging strategy. It works clearly. You know, we’d like to be having more sales on the front end. And so that argues for really thinking through are there other ways to go to market and get a better response rate from customers? And so we’re constantly evaluating that. So there’s no pride. If we see things that are working elsewhere, we’d be happy to adopt it. So we spend time looking at it and thinking about it. When we’ve, when we’ve run some trials around five year guarantees or five year price logs that we try different things.

We haven’t seen the necessary lift ourselves, but maybe that’s because we didn’t do it at scale. So you know, we also want to think about not just the promotional price but what are the roll off and what’s the retail rates. And so it’s an entire package of where you end up over time. So all of which to say we, you know, we continue to evaluate and look at things. We, you know, we’re very focused on returning to broadband growth, but right now we don’t see any reason to change what we’re doing and continue to focus on that.

It doesn’t mean that we’re not trying things left and right to make sure that we can get a better response rate and consideration from new customers.

Jessica Fischer — Chief Financial Officer

And from an ARPU growth perspective across the year, you know, I think that you heard Chris just say that one of the things that we do in the market constantly is to tune offers to make sure that we’re driving the right sort of total customer lifetime value for the business, but also being cognizant of what happens then inside of inside of the year with ARPU and ebitda. And as we do those things and look at pricing overall, there are a number of factors that can drive up or down there, I think on ARPU growth for the year that it’ll be close either way in terms of whether we end up with net growth.

As you noted it, we’re pretty, pretty flat in the first quarter. But it’ll depend on a number of factors and how we sort of address the marketplace,

Chris Winfrey — President and Chief Executive Officer

You know, operationally. Just so you have a sense of how that works is I talked earlier when Craig asked the question the pace of your loyalty, you know, migrations for existing customer base, how, you know, how aggressively leaning in that has a high customer lifetime value impact, but it can have a short term broadband impact. So the pace of proactive and reactive migration of your existing base and some of the, you know, to a lesser extent, some of the offers that you try at the outset set for new acquisition.

And so you have to trade off, you know, the, you know, customer lifetime value and the ROI of some of those efforts versus the short term impact to, you know, arpu and things that all of us like to see from an ARPU development. And that’s an, that’s an active, I wouldn’t say daily, but it’s a monthly practice of just going and taking a look at where we’re at and making sure we’re doing the right thing for the long term health of the business and for the customer relationship and at the same time, you know, meeting our financial commitments along the way as well.

Stefan Anninger — Senior Vice President, Investor Relations

Thanks, Vikash. Thank you. Our next questions, please. Thanks.

Operator

Your next question will come from John Hodulik with UBS.

John Hodulik

Great, thank you guys. Maybe just can we get some additional color on sort of the competitive environment? I think Chris or Jessica, you guys sort of laid out the, what you’re seeing in sort of each of the segments. But from are you seeing more pressure on fixed wireless with AT&T’s efforts in that area? And then on the, on the fiber side, it seems like there’s an aggressive promotional environment, especially around converged offerings. Just wondering if that’s having an impact. And then lastly on the satellite side, obviously a lot of focus on these LEO constellations.

Are you seeing any pressure in rural markets or do you expect that to intensify over the next couple of years? Thanks

Chris Winfrey — President and Chief Executive Officer

Goodness, John, you. There’s a lot in there. So let me, let me try to start from the very top about the operating environment and competitive environment. You heard a little bit in our commentary. Our issue right now really is the top of funnel issue. So what do I mean by that? Our yield at the point of sale is as strong as ever. Our churn remains at historical lows and you know, that’s really supported, supported by the value of the products and everything that we’re doing to bundle in, which is driving churn lower.

You know, the external factors on top of that funnel, which I’ll come back to some of the specifics that you asked in just a second. But the top of the funnel external factors, they’re really the same, which is that we have new competition and any form of new competition has impact. So yes, we see the continued footprint expansion from cell phone Internet, where AT&T is taking the place of others have slowed down. But AT and T has filled that gap with a fixed wireless access product that originally they said they didn’t think made a whole lot of sense.

On the other hand, the pace of gigabit overbuild growth, it continues at the same pace it’s been and so there’s nothing really new there. Our share in those fiber overlap areas, as Jessica mentioned, including particularly mature fiber overlap areas, that remains above the competition generally across our footprint and the promotional activity, you know, I guess is the big question there too is, you know, did it vary? Yes. Throughout the quarter it was up and down and varied by competitor and during the course of the quarter.

But it is not a fundamental change in the level of promotional activity. And the external side, you know, we have a continued muted housing environment, a slow household formation, and as we talked about before, low move rates and mobile substitution growth, it’s still, you know, there, but it’s seems to be slowing a little bit, hopefully. So what does that all mean? If you step back our yield across all channels, it’s good and improving turns low issues about considering more consideration of sales traffic at the top of the funnel.

And you know, that really comes down to, I think, continued improvement in our service reputation, our marketing, our offer expressions and the way that we’re using mobile and video really to drive broadband. And so, you know, we’re fully focused on those areas. I can tell you we’re sitting here waiting on a better housing environment, which I do think will happen. But in the meantime, we’re focused on what we can do and there’s an opportunity to be an even better operator here along the way and through both the external conditions and our own efforts, I think we can get back to broadband growth.

That was your first big question. The Second was on AT&T and fixed wireless access entry, which, you know, they are filling the gap that where lower growth from others is subsided or the growth rates are subsiding. So I think that answers that the converged offer that we’re seeing from other providers. Look, there’s a bit of flattery that’s going on there because everything that we do seems to be copied. And so even the branding of our Spectrum one I think has been mimicked, but its capabilities are limited in terms of footprint where we have the ability to provide convergence and 100% of the footprint.

You’ve seen multiple competitors come out and try to talk about a savings guarantee. They don’t do that against us. We do a Savings guarantee against AT&T Mobile and Verizon. We guarantee $1,000 of savings. So you saw that kind of copied even on the service commitment. If you take a look at the fine print on others who copied our service commitment, it’s not the same. We actually provide a guarantee and that means that we’ll actually pick up the phone, not just call you back when we don’t and we’ll show up on the same day if you have a service or installation.

So I think the quality of what we’re doing is higher and you are seeing some people try to mimic some of the convergence. I think it’s talking up our advantages. If you take a look at some of the slides we’ve shown investors in the past, you know, our capabilities are there better, our ability to save customers money is higher and the quality of our service as America’s connectivity company with 100% US based sales and service, we’ve made that investment and I think we’re set up to deliver, we need to, you know, it doesn’t mean that we’re perfect.

We have a lot of room for improvement to execute better. But we’ve made that investment and so that sets us up pretty well to do that. You know, on satellite. I would just say we don’t underestimate any competitor, particularly one that is, you know, as well capitalized as they are and as innovative as, you know, all of not just Starlink but also Amazon and others. But so far tracking in data doesn’t suggest a significant customer share loss to satellite. It might be, you know, we do see evidence that in some of the subsidized rural footprint, we’re hitting all of our targets in subsidized rural footprint.

I think we would be doing even better there if some of that market had not been preceded with satellite, which in certain markets with low density. I think long term it’s actually a great product. I think if the density is low enough it can serve enough capacity and enough customers. I think it’s ideal from a full broadband coverage of the country where really fiber based solutions can’t and probably shouldn’t go. I also think from a satellite perspective there’s probably more areas there to cooperate than to think of as a direct competitor to in a suburban and urban environment.

And so if you think one way of doing that is a, We’ve already done a 5G is our backup service through Invincible WI Fi, you know, other ways to attach satellite and to become a seller of that product to the extent that they were willing to have us as a reseller bundle that together with our broadband service. I think there’s some merits looking at that as well. And we’re thinking through all those things. So go back to on satellite where I started. We don’t underestimate the capabilities either from innovation or from a capital perspective.

But we’re keeping a close eye on it. So far we don’t see a major impact and that could be more friend than foe.

Stefan Anninger — Senior Vice President, Investor Relations

Great. Thanks Chris. Thanks, John. Operator. We’ll take our next question.

Operator

Your next question will come from Sebastiano Petti with J.P. Morgan.

Sebastiano Petti

Hi, thank you so much for taking the question. I just wanted to see if you could circle back on prior expectations for to grow EBITDA X the transition cost. Is that still the plan for the year? So that’s my first question. And then thinking about, I guess in terms of broadband arpu, you did see a little bit of a slowdown there, but could you help us think about the expectation for the balance of the year? I mean I think Christy talked about trade offs near term, trade offs for the longer term kind of health of the business.

Should we anticipate your pricing strategy or the annual cadence of price increases within those comments? Is that something that we should probably contemplate, maybe broadband pricing increase later this year is maybe not necessarily something we should expect as you kind of try to maybe help the CLVs in the long term. Try to keep churn down. Thank you.

Jessica Fischer — Chief Financial Officer

I’ll start out on the EBITDA side. We do continue to plan to grow EBITDA slightly this year with the benefit of the tailwind from political advertising and as you point out, excluding transition costs as we go through the year. You know, we talked about the tuning exercise around around offers and changes in that tuning are going to have an impact on how close to the line we are on EBITDA growth. But that continues to be our plan on

Chris Winfrey — President and Chief Executive Officer

Broadband arpu. You know, Jessica can reiterate it, but I don’t want to, you know, say it a different way and then somehow create daylight after the fact on, you know, broadband arpu, other than to say, you know, the piece that you asked and on pricing increase, we haven’t made any determination on that yet. You know, for obvious reasons. You know, it’s always been our strategy to try to keep prices as low as we can so that we can have enhanced competitiveness. That’s been part of our philosophy.

It was our philosophy even when it wasn’t popular. And it allows you to have better acquisition and better retention. That’s still the case. And so we try to minimize that but also recognize that, you know, we’re still in certain parts of the business have an inflationary environment. So we think through those real time as the year goes on. And there’s a multi factor consideration that Jessica talked about and I talked about before to going down. So we haven’t made any decisions on that front yet.

Jessica Fischer — Chief Financial Officer

Yeah. And I think because of that, from an overall Internet ARPU growth perspective, it’ll be close either way in terms of where we land on overall Internet ARPU growth for the year. But it’ll depend on a number of those factors that Chris talked about and the tuning around offers as well as what you do with the overall pricing profile across all of our products.

Sebastiano Petti

Great. And then just. Okay, thank you.

Chris Winfrey — President and Chief Executive Officer

Go ahead, Sebastian. We’ll let you cheat. Go far away. Stefan’s upset.

Sebastiano Petti

Sorry. Yes, appreciate that. Just quickly, any context you could provide around the upsides to the synergies at Cox. I mean, you’re just kind of given the Upgrade here today, sources of that and then just kind of how we’re thinking about that. Thank you.

Jessica Fischer — Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, there’s so in moving from 500 million to 800 million, there’s a portion of that related procurement synergies, including programming as well as we just have a better sort of picture and visibility into the financials. And so baseline lining some of those costs that we see at a more detailed level against what we expect based on how we operate. And it’s really how we, how we get from place to place. And as I said, I think there’s space for us to continue to find more there.

Chris Winfrey — President and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, I think there will be. Thank you for the generation.

Stefan Anninger — Senior Vice President, Investor Relations

All right, this time. Operator. We’ll take our next question, please.

Operator

Your next question will come from Steven Cahall with Wells Fargo.

Steven Cahall

Thank you, Chris. Yesterday, Comcast reported a pretty strong inflection in their subscriber trends. It came on the back of a huge quarter for event marketing and they’ve been pretty aggressive lately on ARPU and price locks as well. I know you all have been very, very active and proactive in the market with the way you’ve done pricing and packaging. You also talked about a lot of the competition. Do you feel like at this point you need to get even more aggressive on either the marketing or the packaging front to kind of cut through this competitive noise, or do you feel like if you just kind of continue on, you know, kind of doing what you’re doing, that things will start to improve here as we get through some of this kind of competitive hump?

And then just one on. On churn and gross ads. You know, traditionally you all have done really well with jump balls. When we’ve seen move activity, it does sound like, you know, from what you said, your gross ad environment looks a little different now with the top of the funnel than it did historically. Any way to think about how if we do start to see a pickup and move activity, you think that can drive the business forward? Thank you.

Chris Winfrey — President and Chief Executive Officer

Sure. So, look, first off, you know, you should know that we were pleased, we were great to see the change in trajectory for Comcast and their Internet and their success in mobile. As we talked about before, we don’t have any overlap with Comcast and we partner with them on all kinds of different fronts from a technology and platform perspective. So we’re, we’re cheering them on. I think it’s good for everybody. They may be coming from a different place and timing going to your question related to pricing and packaging, but of course, our team immediately, as yesterday, is already Starting to see is there anything, any good nuggets there that we can get that we could see that might work for us and copy them to the extent there’s something there.

So far we haven’t seen that but we know that they’ve been complementary of us when we’ve done things around Spectrum Mobile and we’ll just take a look and see if there’s anything there that’s consistent with our kind of long term competitive and financial objectives. As you mentioned, there might have been some one time benefits and they may be coming from a different place but there’s no pride here in terms of, you know, adopting something that works, that we’ll take a look. We’re really pleased to see what they did.

You know, are we going to stand still and just hold tight? No, we’re not. Our head is not in the sand. I do think that our issue here is less about, you know, not that we’re open minded to offer expression but we’ve tried a lot of different things. I don’t think that’s our, you know, our underlying issue. I think our ability to cut through and message to customers around our value and utility is actually the thing that’s creating pain for us. Some of that ties to service reputation that we spend, you know, feeds back in and you know, if you think about our willingness to, you know, think out of the box, you know, the hiring of Nick Jeffrey as our chief operating officer really ties into those two things.

And I think that could be, you know, obviously good for us, but I think it could be good for the industry as well. Of having somebody new to the team who’s, you know, dealt with, you know, highly competitive market, wireless market in the UK, a global B2B business with Vodafone and then as an overbuilder and attacker successful frankly, you know, here in the US I think adding that skill set to an already pretty talented team that operates and executes really well, you know, I think is going to be good for us.

But I, you know, for all the reasons I talked about before, I think it could be good for, you know, the industry. Just because we don’t compete with each other. We can watch what each other is doing and learn from what we do. I think we do a pretty good job done. You know, the other question you asked is around jump balls and gross ads. The thing I would tell you is the, the gross ads was the variance year over year, our term did better. The vast majority of that came from the low income segment.

And so I think we, you know, as we dug more into that, realized there’s probably some offers that we’ve had in the market before that weren’t as prevalent and we need to go back and reevaluate some stuff that we’ve had that’s worked. And so I, I think that’s probably a decent sized driver of the variance we had year over year in sales. And so we’re working through that as well. So I, I again just to come back, I don’t think it’s offer expression. It may be a little bit of offer availability in the, in the low income.

I think the bigger, and that’s, that’s kind of at the, at the margin, you know, year over year. The bigger picture is how do you get back to full time growth across all segments and that really comes to that are doing a better job messaging our value and utility and you know, earning the service reputation that we have invested in already. So it’s not about additional money. I don’t think we need to spend anything more. In marketing. Some sense, you may say that, you know, we’re spreading too thin.

You know, maybe there’s opportunities to come back if we can simplify the message along the way. And we’re thinking through all that.

Jessica Fischer — Chief Financial Officer

One more thing I’d add on to the end there because you did talk about movers and you hear us sometimes talk about movers and given where the environment is, that does create confusion in some cases, actually do really well in particular with the mover cohort. And it has to do with the scale of our footprint and what we can do with transitioning customers from one location to another. And so even when you look at sort of what’s happening in overall market share shift and you might say, oh well, wouldn’t more movement be problematic for you?

Actually movement in the form of people moving from one household to the other continues to be something that we see as a net benefit to us. And so more movement between homes in the marketplace and more movers actually is an overall benefit to the extent that there is sort of recovery in the housing space. And I think as we think about joining our footprint together with the Cox footprint, that will improve in that respect as well. And as we can cooperate with some of our peers, we actually try to do everything that we can to take good advantage of those good customer relationships where we have them, which is in a lot of spaces.

Chris Winfrey — President and Chief Executive Officer

Jessica kind of alluded to, not only will the Cox footprint, you know, actually help both footprints in terms of off footprint move retention, but I think there’s a lot more that we can do within the industry. We’ve had some efforts in the past. It’s not as successful as it could and should be. And so we’re actively working together with some of our partners there to to do even better on that front.

Stefan Anninger — Senior Vice President, Investor Relations

Thanks, Steve. That concludes our call. Operator, back to you.

Operator

[Operator Closing Remarks]