The home broadband market remains a slog for US cable operators, with their net broadband subscriber losses continuing to mount thanks to the two-prong pressure from fibre and fixed wireless access (FWA).
Given the prolonged subscriber losses for cable’s core connectivity play, mobile and the accompanying virtues of convergence aren’t a sideline activity for cable; it’s the whole ballgame right now.
In that context, Q3 2025 offered another shot of good news from the cable players’ MVNO organisations. Comcast and Charter reported north of 900,000 net mobile line additions between them in the quarter, thanks in no small part to Comcast once again blowing by its personal best quarterly mobile performance. Moreover, each saw much-needed revenue growth from the category – growth they hope to spur on by driving multiline take-up and more premium account mixes.
Comcast’s mobile growth improves (with a free-line caveat)
Comcast saw its best quarterly mobile line tally yet in Q3 2025, with its 414,000 net mobile line adds during the quarter putting Comcast at 8.94 million total mobile lines and over 14% penetration of its broadband base. However, CFO Jason Armstrong noted during the company’s Q3 2025 earnings presentation that “nearly half of our residential postpaid phone connects came from customers taking a free line.”
In short, Comcast’s adoption of a free-line bundling mechanic in mid-2025 played a big role in that uptick in subscriber acquisition. This, of course, is not unlike the jump in net add cadence Charter saw after uncorking its Spectrum One bundle way back in November 2022.
Armstrong went on, however, to note that Comcast “saw strong uptake of [its] new premium unlimited plans, enhancing [its] value in the postpaid market.” Comcast will need Xfinity Mobile to translate a significant portion of those free lines into paying customers when promo roll-off time hits in H2 2026 if the company’s going to capture the convergence revenue growth it’s targeting.
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By GlobalDataFor that, Comcast hopes newer wrinkles in its premium tier plan – i.e., gigabit-level speeds (thanks to a WiFi boost), 4K HD streaming, higher hotspot allotments, advanced spam call protection, and guaranteed device upgrade capability with discounts – provide a robust enough postpaid offering to keep those subscribers satisfied once they are paying full freight.
For Charter, mobile doubles as lifeline and growth engine
The headline numbers at the top of Charter’s Q3 2025 report card show the strain from its combined stressors, resulting in year-over-year (YoY) declines across total revenue (-0.9%), residential revenue (-1.1%), and adjusted EBITDA (-1.5%). While broadband revenue was up 1.7%, that’s a slight uptick driven by promo roll-offs and pricing actions – an unsustainable formula in the long term. Thus, mobile remains Charter’s bright spot.
Consequently, it was no surprise when Charter CEO Chris Winfrey quite literally kicked off the company’s Q3 2025 earnings call by talking mobile: “During the third quarter, we remained the fastest-growing mobile provider in the US. We added nearly 500,000 Spectrum Mobile lines in the quarter and 2 million lines over the last 12 months, over 20% growth.”
To be specific: Charter’s net mobile line add count for Q3 2025 was actually +493,000, which marked the first time since Q1 2024 that the company’s net add cadence dipped below 500,000/quarter. The 2.03 million lines added in the last 12 months brings its total mobile line count to just shy of 11.4 million, good for +21.8% YoY growth.
However, while the YoY increase in mobile revenue for Q3 2025 ($153m) continues to represent a crucial offset to ills elsewhere in Charter’s portfolio, it’s important to note that Charter’s mobile subscriber acquisition rate (+21.8% YoY) is no longer outrunning its mobile service revenue growth rate (+19.2%). That could be the first sign that there’s a hitch in Charter’s free-to-paid conversion success.
Further evidence along those lines comes from CFO Jessica Fischer, who noted “higher gross additions year over year, offset by disconnects on a larger base” while speaking during Charter’s Q3 earnings call.
MVNOs on alert
If Charter’s net adds dropped despite the higher gross adds, then the company’s losing more mobile lines than previously, hard stop. Charter’s efforts to rectify any slippage in its conversion of free line subscribers to paying accounts at promo roll-off time will invite scrutiny in the quarters ahead.
And now that Comcast has followed Charter down the free-line rabbit hole, there’s likely to be few observers paying more attention to Charter’s lessons learned than Comcast and the legion of smaller regional cable MVNOs hoping to follow in their wake.
