All right. Thank you all for joining us today. Again, I'm John Hodulik, the Telecom and Media Analyst here at UBS. I'm very pleased to introduce our next speaker today. It's Chris Winfrey, the CEO of Charter Communications. Chris, thanks for joining us.
Good to be here.
Maybe to kick us off today, can you give us a sense for what the major priorities are for you and the company as we head into 2025?
Look, we're right now, right smack dab in the middle of a multi-year strategy implementation, and it's going well. And when we think about it and talk about it internally, if you think about what we're doing, it's the largest network expansion since the 1980s. And it's the largest physical upgrade of the network since the 1990s. We're getting the opportunity to go put together convergence in a way that's really not been done anywhere else in the world and where we have a strategic and structural advantage. And then on top of that, Charter, not just all those things I described as what the industry is doing, but Charter really taking a big stab at video transformation. So that's exciting. And so when you think about it from an employee or from a management perspective, this is a really unique time in cable.
If you'd had any one of those to do as part of your career, you'd be thrilled. And here we are, we're getting to do four of those. And I recognize for investors, it may not always feel the same way. We're coming out at the back end here of an unwind of the ACP, which was unexpected. And then in addition to that, we're dealing successfully with a new wave of competition, and I think that's going well. But if you sit back, not only are we coming out, I think, at the back end of a lot of that, but we do have the best network everywhere we operate, fully converged, gigabit everywhere we operate, soon to be symmetrical and multi-gig everywhere, combined with great products.
And we have the ability to save customers a lot of money, hundreds or thousands of dollars in mobile while still having the best quality. And we invest in service, onshore, 100% insourced, onshore sales and service infrastructure. I like to talk about it as made in America, which is true. And then in addition to that, a commitment to continue to invest to make sure that we maintain those advantages. So I think we're in a great position long term. It doesn't mean that 2024 hasn't been a little bit of a challenge, but it's going well.
That's great. And I think we can dive into a number of those topics during our session here today. And let's start with broadband. Comcast was here yesterday and gave an update in the fourth quarter with some slightly higher high-speed data losses in the fourth quarter and some pressure on ARPU that's going to put them on the lower end of the 3%-4% range. What are you seeing in your business as we look out into 2024?
Typically, we don't do interquarter updates, so I'll start with that. But given that it got some attention yesterday, let's just start with where I began, which is 2024 has been a year that's had a fair number of ups and downs and one-time impacts, and particularly in Q3 and Q4. So if you peel apart Q3, we had the largest amount of ACP disconnects coming through, at least for us. It was significant. It was partially offset by a good seasonal back-to-school that was probably a little better than we expected, as well as some other seasonal benefits inside of Q3. That obviously doesn't repeat itself inside of Q4. In Q4, we said on our earnings call that we'd have over 100,000 ACP disconnects inside the quarter for Charter. And in addition to that, we'd have the impact of two very large hurricanes.
The impact of the hurricane is slightly larger than what we thought. Customers who are remodeling their home, got flooded, have disconnected temporarily, they'll be back, or customers whose home needs to be unfortunately rebuilt also would be back, and that's probably around 30,000 customers right now. I'll reserve that. We'll give the final number on the earnings call, but if you leave those one-times aside, the underlying trend for subscribers is actually slightly better year- over- year, and so we see the benefit of that. Our new pricing and packaging is working very well. We're optimistic going into 2025. We're looking for a more simple year in terms of reporting, and we're very much excited about our long-term growth prospects for broadband. As it relates to pricing, our pricing strategy hasn't changed as it relates to how you take rate increases, how you pass through inflation.
We try to avoid those really at all costs. Nothing has changed there, but we also had a low amount of gig penetration, and so we have opportunities along the way through our new pricing and packaging to earn ARPU, and so I feel good about the trajectory we're on, and outside of some gap allocations because of the new pricing and packaging, we don't see any major change in the ARPU output from where we've been. I should mention, we talked about on the earnings as well. We'll have one-time credits for the storm. We're going to disclose that in revenue, and so you're going to have to back that out from ARPU, but absent that, that issue goes.
It sounds like, correct me if I'm not remembering this correctly, but outside of the ACP issues, the trends were better year- over- year in the third quarter as well on the high-speed data side.
We had the seasonality benefit probably year- over- year as well. But I think if you tamp down that down a little bit, the year- over- year in Q4 is also better than it was this time last year.
What do you think is driving that? What looks like, again, underlying improvement of sort of two quarters in a row? Maybe relatively modest, but is it things that Charter's doing, or do you think it's sort of a stabilization within the industry?
I think it's probably, if I'm—I'd love to tell you it's all about Charter. I think it's more the latter, which is a bit of stabilization that's taken place. Not to say that we can't have the first thing you mentioned, which is performance at Charter. We're making significant investments in network evolution. We have a tremendous amount of new plant that's coming on as it relates to the rural extension, new pricing and packaging, customer commitment. All these things are designed to have an outsized impact on subscriber net adds, but they're early. They're long-term investments. And so I think right now it's a combination of just overall market and the beginnings of what I hope is Charter-specific in terms of our strategy.
More to come there.
More to come.
Maybe we'll talk about sort of different modes of competition. First, fixed wireless. That's been sort of the more immediate driver of competition or the change in competition over the last couple of years, I'd say. What's your view of the product? How much staying power do you think it has, and how do you see it impacting the business over time?
Look, we operate in a fully competitive environment. That's not anything new. We have wireline competition in a large portion of our footprint. We have multiple cell phone internet companies or fixed wireless access. We now have satellite in the low-density areas, which is something I'm sure we can talk about. So it's a fully competitive market space. As it relates to cell phone internet in particular, it turns out there is a niche market for lower quality, lower speed, and lower reliability service that I wouldn't have thought was necessarily the case. But I think the big surprise is that customers haven't yet realized that it actually costs them more money. And we, as an industry, haven't done a really good job of telling customers it's actually costing you more.
The only way you can get that price point for the cell phone internet home product is if you pay for a high-cost mobile line or an off-in-case multiple high-cost mobile line, and if that's the product, that's the combination. When you take our home internet product together with our mobile, you save lots of money with a much more reliable, faster product when you take that from Spectrum than if you took cell phone internet, and so we need to break through, and we're trying a lot of different ways to make sure that we can do that.
Are you changing the messaging, or is it new packaging that you guys have been talking about?
I think we're not standing still. I do think that as speeds increased and we get a fully deployed, ubiquitous, symmetrical, multi-gig new products and services that develop that demand that bandwidth, that our network will be even more advantaged than it already is. But also the introduction of new pricing and packaging where we decided that we could better utilize our mobile product and our video product to really benefit broadband. And so we're doing that. And so we're not standing still. We're making a significant amount of investments in the network. We're doing a better job with convergence, rolling out new products. And we've modified our new pricing and packaging to be able to respond in the marketplace without losing ARPU.
Gotcha. Now shifting to fiber to the home. We had a fiber to the home panel yesterday. We had John Stankey here today, Verizon, T-Mobile yesterday. It does look like the build-out is accelerating a bit. I think we're looking for 10 million new homes this year. I think the U.S. is in the 50%-55% range. I would say, where do you think that sort of competitive fiber footprint sort of tops out? And are you guys talk about how you execute in a market as you see increased competition from fiber?
Sure. We mentioned on our third quarter call that we're about 55% overlap with gig, similarly gig providers. I call it gig providers because 99.X% of our network is fiber as well. So we're all fiber. The difference is do you have a coax or a wireless drop? And that's really the only distinction. And we all have that. So 55% today, it's in our business plan that that'll increase. I think the one thing I'd be careful of is when people are making announcements about how much wireline overbuild they're going to do, they're not taking into account how much somebody else is going to do. And so you have a duplication of passings that takes place, and you won't know until the other person gets there first who has to back off.
That was a theme of the fiber to the home.
Right.
A lot of people called it fiber to the press release.
Yes. I look, there's something to be said for that because the ROI of a wireline overbuild is already pretty poor. The ROI of a multiple wireline overbuild is significantly negative, and so it makes no sense, and so I'd like to think that good economics will prevail and people will take a look and say, "That doesn't make any sense," and I think the amount of, while we have inside of our business plan, a higher amount of wireline overbuild, I don't think it'll be as much as everyone announced for that exact reason, and you're getting into areas where you have lower density. The good stuff has been built by definition, and so what's being built is lower density, higher cost, which even puts more pressure on the ROI than what already existed.
Right. Actually, I thought you got some good news on that front. Last week, AT&T laid out sort of 45 million locations in region out of 67. So it's only two-thirds of sort of their footprint. That's good news. Comcast on their call talking about penetration suggested that when fiber opens up in a market over time, they didn't give a range with sort of three- to five-year period, they end up splitting the market with the fiber provider. Is that what you're seeing, or how do you see the?
I haven't seen what they said, so I won't comment on that other than, for us, typically when we have a new wireline overbuilder enter into the marketplace, the first two years we have a few percentage points decline. It's the new novel thing, and you get some customers who are willing to migrate and take it, but then it stabilizes, and what that means is that we continue to have very much the high penetration inside of our footprint, and the more and more we offer converged services together with mobile, the more and more I think we can even do better on that.
Got it. At the Liberty Media Investor Day, you noted that Charter is uniquely positioned to deliver a converged connectivity product. Can you describe that again here?
So there's a slide that we put out, and I don't know how much coverage it got, that really says the numbers are the numbers. So we have 58 million passings today and growing. 100% of those wireline passings have the ability to deliver mobile and vice versa. It is by far the largest inside of our footprint, both today and when you compare it to what people have announced. So we have a unique capability inside of our market that none of our competitors have to be able to deliver wireline and wireless services 100% of our footprint and to do it in a way that our competitors can't match. And the numbers show that's the case. We upgrade everywhere we operate. So when you think about our strategy, we have gigabit services everywhere across our footprint today.
When we do high split in DOCSIS 4.0, it'll be across our entire footprint. We'll have symmetrical and multi-gig speeds everywhere we operate, and we combine that with gigabit wireless services because of our Wi-Fi to provide mobile speeds that nobody can match, so I think that was an important slide. It goes to a little bit of what you were highlighting before, and it is the structural advantage that we need to take advantage of, and we need to make sure that working together with other people in the ecosystem that we develop products and services that go beyond just our speed boost and our Spectrum Mobile SSID that really start to push the limits of what this network can deliver.
Do you think that the initiatives at, well, Verizon now with the Frontier acquisition, what AT&T talked about last week and T-Mobile, is there those wireless competitors leaning into convergence? Do you think that changes the competitive environment either in wireless or in the broadband side?
I think the slide that I was referencing showed what at the time had been announced. And to your point, it's still just a fraction of their footprint, even with what they've announced, some of which may be duplicative. So I don't see a dramatic change.
Gotcha. Maybe if we can sort of put ACP to bed, 5 million subs at Charter when the program was canceled. What happened to those subs? Where are they now? And I would imagine most of them are still on the books and on different rate plans. If you could just sort of give us the.
So, the vast majority of our ACP customers, at the request of the FCC and the White House, we had gone out to our existing customers as well as new customers. So, the majority of those customers were already pre-existing customers on pre-existing speed plans, often high-speed plans. And the vast majority of those customers are still with us today. So, over 5 million customers, some portion of normal churn that you would expect. And then, in addition to that, what you would call outsized or abnormal churn from the program ceasing to exist. And that's probably going to be less than 10%. That's based on what we've said already publicly and what we forecasted for the fourth quarter. So, the incremental loss should be around under 10%. I think that's a really good outcome.
We're proud as a company that we've been able to continue to provide that service to low-income households, keep those customers connected, and the majority of those customers that are still with us are not on a retention plan, so to the extent we needed to offer a one-time credit or to move them into a different package that was more affordable, we did that. We offered a free line for Spectrum Mobile, which is harder to take for customers to move than you would think, and so it's actually very much a minority of the ACP base that is sitting on any type of offer today, and so I think it was unfortunate that the program ended the way it did, but I'm really pleased with how the company managed it.
It doesn't sound like the end of ACP and maybe moving some of those customers onto, you said it's a low percentage of retention plans, but doesn't it seem like it's affecting the overall? I mean, obviously, it's a much bigger base, but is it affecting ARPU either?
No, I don't think it's had a major impact on ARPU. It's had some, but you would have seen most of that already through our results through Q2 and Q3 because we've been active in that environment for we got ahead of it. So we were active with it for quite some time. I do think one of the disadvantages of ACP not being around is you are seeing, you will see customers having to move in and out of the segment. And so keeping customers, one thing is the number of subscribers you have, but keeping customers permanently connected for remote work, for school activities, that will be a downside of something like ACP not being in place. And I think that's probably one would argue the bigger benefit that existed through ACP.
Got it. Maybe let's chat briefly about video. You've got all the major media company, DTC services included with your basic video plans now. When will you start marketing this? And what do you expect the impact to be on your business? Do you expect it to change the trends that we've seen in either video or broadband?
These programmer apps represent almost $80 of retail value that's being provided to the customer that was not being provided before. It's my interest of getting that to market and marketing it is very high. I'm impatient. But sometimes I have to be reminded that we just got done with the first one of these that set the stage, which was Disney just a little over a year ago. Let me tell you about the path that we're on. One is you got to get all of these direct-to-consumer apps launched. We're largely there. We still have Peacock yet to go in terms of the majors. I guess we're launching Max right now.
And then the second step is, because a lot of these programmer apps have an ad-free version, making sure that our customers can upgrade to the ad-free or manage their existing account through their DTC inclusion versus the incremental cost of the ad-free, which is one of our policies. And that, because of different programmer authentication and credentials, account management [is a] complicated process. And so we want to be careful not to overmarket something before we've made it simple and easy for the customer to get in and make adjustments. And we're working with the programmers to do that. The third piece is making sure that we can launch DTC to broadband. So our non-video customers, which is a really exciting space; it's not because it's less important. It's just from a timing and priority perspective of how we're setting things up; it'll come next.
And then the final one is creating what I would call a video store where a customer really can manage whether they're a video customer, a broadband customer, or Spectrum, can really manage all of their services there: DTC inclusion, ad-free upgrade, existing account alignment, as well as the direct-to-consumer apps to broadband customers or tack-ons for skinny packages as well in a single place that's easy to find, easy to use. And that, sometime inside the first half of this coming year, is when that'll be launched. And that's when you'll see us really lean in, not just from us, from marketing.
But one of the things that's been really fun about the process we've been in over the past year is I think the programming community understands that we are fighting for video in a way that almost nobody else is and that we have an interest in a product that needs to be profitable for everybody in the ecosystem and that we're incentivized to go drive it so that we can help our broadband acquisition and our broadband retention. And as a result, I think the programmers are lining up behind us and realizing our incentives are in the right place. And we're trying to create value for customers, which ultimately is better for them in the long term.
I think there's an aha moment here in terms of distributors and programmers really finding a way to work together to evolve the product in a way that makes sense for customers, but also preserve the economics inside of this ecosystem.
So you said number two. I sort of understood number one, number three. Number two, DTC to broadband. Is that marketing a DTC-only package or what would explain?
So it would be some either à la carte and working together with the programmers. We could do packages as well. One of the things that we announced in the deal with Max, which was more so than a lot of the other deals, really industry-leading, forward-thinking. David Zaslav was the one who leaned into that the most and said, "We're going to actually make Max, including HBO, available to all your select customers." But as part of that, what they really wanted to see us do is to use our sales and distribution capabilities towards broadband. We have 25,000 in-house sales associates across all of our channels. So we have a very deep sales capability and that applies to broadband as well. The ability to sell the direct-to-consumer app to those customers, either à la carte or as part of a package.
And so we both have mutual incentives to actually go do that and have a preferred marketing relationship. We have those capabilities with every single one of the programming deals that we've done in the past year to really go sell. And so whether you want to have a big expanded package that has the hybrid linear DTC included, skinny packages, or just be a broadband customer who we're selling DTCs to, we have the ability to do all of that and service all of your needs, even more so within Xumo where it all works together seamlessly.
So talk a little bit about Xumo before we move off of video. I mean, first of all, why not phase out traditional video and go sort of all-in, all-IP? I think the boxes are cheaper. It's more of a self-installation. I mean, is that sort of part of the product roadmap?
Xumo is a great product. For anybody who wants it, we want them to have it because it is a better product than anything else I think that's out there. Unified Search and Discovery, a fantastic voice remote that Comcast developed, a user interface that was really coming out of Sky is my understanding. We're a 50/50 partner in that together with Comcast. It is the best product in the marketplace, particularly for what we're trying to do. That being said, it is what we're deploying on the increment. The only type of box that we buy on the increment is what we're deploying on the increment. Going into a household and ripping out somebody's QAM set-top box is actually harder than you might think.
Even when we got rid of DTAs, one-way digital terminal adapters, that was painful to take that even though we were putting in a two-way better product, and taking out some of the legacy boxes where we've moved to MPEG-4 and whatnot, one of the biggest complaints, just as an aside, is customers complaining that they lost their clock, so it's a disruptive process, and we're not about doing that. If they want to migrate in, we're happy to do that, and Xumo is a better product, but we're not going to go scrape them out at this stage. I do think your point is freeing up some of that capacity.
The network, yeah.
The network. That will happen over time. The more you go with IP and the more you pull out of broadcast, the ability to go do that through both switched digital video, moving more into the switched, as well as the IP nature of the video service will provide some of that capacity.
You've referenced the new pricing and packaging a couple of times. Can you discuss why you launched the new pricing and packaging this fall? What's it intended to do and maybe how it should impact overall ARPU and maybe high-speed data ARPU?
You know, if you go back a few years ago, our video product, we became frustrated that programmers were providing more value outside of the traditional distribution by going direct-to-consumer, à la carte, less advertising, deeper content, cheaper price, all these things. And so we looked at our own video product and said, "As much as we're trying to do, it's becoming a liability to our broadband customers as opposed to an asset." And so we decoupled and we just had video as an add-on to the product. Customers were getting rate increases because we were passing through programmer rate increases. And they didn't make the distinction that that's my video provider. They just said, "It's my broadband provider who I also take video, and I'm getting a rate increase." And competitively, that made it a little bit of a liability.
So that's why we ended up in the situation we ended a year ago. That's why we were dead serious that we were going to walk away from video if we couldn't find a way to have a product that actually made sense and created value with customers. We did that. And so once we did that, and even though it's a little early because we'll be there in the first half of 2025 when the strategy, I think, gets fully exposed for what it can do, we felt we had gotten enough value in there and that we could hold our head high and that it was time to make better use of both video, making an asset again to our broadband base, as well as mobile. We still have Spectrum One out there, which is a free mobile line for a year.
But because the retail price of Spectrum Mobile is $30, it's the fastest mobile product in the country, and it's at the lowest price for that type of quality. And so you didn't have to necessarily give it away for $0. What you could do is you could bundle mobile and/or video together with your internet to actually be able to drive lower promotional internet rates and at retail despite having a higher amount of customer relationship ARPU. In some sense, when we talked before about not sitting back in front of cell phone internet, not waiting around for the customer to realize and look at their bill and say, "I'm actually paying more money," is to say, "Fine, you know what? Let's make better use of video.
Let's make better use of mobile, and even though we'll have more value at the time of sale and more ARPU, we can demonstrate a lower promotional and retail rate on internet in a way that makes sense for customers and for us.
Got it. Can you also talk about your new customer commitment? That's another initiative I think you talked about on the third quarter call.
Sure. I hate to not go. I could spend tons of time on that because I'm really passionate around our customer service and the commitment that we're willing to make. It comes about because we were already delivering a lot of these service commitments. So the ability to have same-day repair, same-day trouble call, the ability to have transparency on the bill, to have installation same day or next day. We were making those commitments. We were delivering on those already for residential, SMB, and enterprise. And so we said, "Why not just go out and make the commitment and tell customers if we fail, if we're not able to deliver for you, we'll provide proactively a credit." And why would we do that? Because nobody else can. I really don't think that our competitors are able to do that because of what I said before.
100% of our service is onshore, in-house, and we have the ability and well-paid, good-paying jobs, so we have a committed workforce that is dedicated to go deliver that type of service, and it's a competitive advantage. It's why we've made the investment, so yes, we'll have a little bit of credits along the way because of the proactive credits, but nothing drives people to improvement faster than putting a flashlight on where credits are being paid out, and you find out where you got to get better, and we'll keep doing that to make it an even bigger advantage.
Great. Maybe we'll dig in a little bit to network evolution and network expansion. First, on the evolution side, High Split is largely done in the step one markets. What are the services you're able to provide in these areas? And the $100 per homes passed cost was very inexpensive. What's next in terms of the sort of the network roadmap?
Sure. So in the step one markets, eight major DMAs, it's a gig-by-gig today. And next year, if we want to do a software upgrade, which we will, we'll make that two-by-one. The next wave will go to five-by-one capabilities through distributed access architecture. And the final wave will be DOCSIS 4.0 with 10-by-one capabilities. More than we see today in terms of cutting consumer needs. However, just like every other upgrading cable, because it is ubiquitous, because it's the entire country, developers of product and software that demands or commands that type of bandwidth see that they have a full playing field that they can develop for, and they don't have to solve for the least common denominator. So I think it drives better products. All of which, whether it's each one of those three stages, we're doing, as you mentioned, at $100 incremental cost per passing.
When you think about our customer ARPU, it's pretty attractive. And if it were your company and if you were going to leave it behind for your family, which I wish that was the case, it's not. But it's what you would do as a long-term shareholder. It's absolutely the right thing to do, and we're on that path. Once we get through the network evolution, I don't see any major next wave of physical or financial upgrade taking place to the network. Could there be down the road? Of course, but it'll have new revenue attached to it. But there's nothing in our line of sight today that says that we need to go make an additional capital program in the short or medium term.
I mean, the $100, you went over before, but does that get you to the four-by-one, or does it get you all the way to the?
So it gets you in each of those markets. So in the phase one markets, it gets you to the two-by-one. Phase II markets, it gets you to the five-by-one. And phase three markets, it gets you to the ten-by-one. The ability to go move any one of those earlier markets to ten-by-one is pretty inexpensive. But I'm not even sure that you see a need to go do that anytime soon.
Agreed. Maybe over to network expansion. You've been expanding the network by about 1.4 million location homes per year. Can you maintain this rate going forward? And then how have the returns been versus your model?
We have the physical capacity to maintain that rate of build. Historically, we've done 500,000, 600,000 of constructed homes every year. This year, in terms of physical construction, we'll do about 1.2 million homes constructed. But a lot of that is with rural and subsidized rural. And there's a finite timeline for when that'll take place. And I think we'll be back to our historical construction rate over time. Not only is the rural a higher amount than the business as usual, but it's at a much higher cost per passing for all the obvious reasons. So I don't see the physical capacity to go do that type of construction, but I don't see the opportunity that would meet the ROI to go at this level for a prolonged period of time.
And that's just because the costs are, I think you mentioned it on the call, right?
We have an ROI. It's a very simple formula, which is what's the net cost per passing after any subsidies? What's the revenue, gross margin, indirect costs that you have for that customer's subscriber acquisition cost? What's the penetration that you can achieve on those passings? And it spits out a pretty clear IRR. It's a good IRR at what we've been building. The returns are great. It's a long cash-on-cash payback, but it's pretty low risk in terms of our ability to hit those penetrations. And we've demonstrated that already just to make sure people understood that we're being very disciplined around the capital that we put to work.
Right. So does that 1.2, 1.4 number go down over time in some ways?
It will. I mean, BEAD is out there, but it looks to be a lot less. And I think what we said on our last call is that our overall capital expenditure, even with BEAD, is scheduled to go down in the years to come. So we're peaking out inside of next year. And we gave some outlook in terms of what we think that'll be for next year. And it's pretty similar to where we're at.
Gotcha. And then touching on BEAD, on the call, you definitely signaled sort of less enthusiasm for BEAD. Although I think you won some homes in Louisiana the first day that sort of doled out some of the BEAD funds. Do you expect any changes with the Trump administration to the program to maybe make?
I know nothing more than what I've read in the press, same as you, and so we're eagerly awaiting to see how that works out. I will tell you that the program was approved by Congress, what, almost four years ago, and not a dollar has flowed to construct actual passings. In the meantime, we've built a lot of those passings through state grants, ARP A grants, as well as RDOF, and so the number of passings is a lot lower than what was originally intended. Satellite has proven itself in a low-density environment to be a viable product. Expensive, but probably, if you look at pure economics, probably better than spending the capital to go out to passings that are less than five homes per mile. I think would for sure be the case.
And then on top of that, you had a lot of regulation that got put in around rate regulation, labor that made it unattractive for private capital to invest in certain states that weren't able to push back sufficiently. And so there's a fraction of our states where we're even under the current rules that we'd be able to bid because it's not conducive to private capital. All in, I think that means the opportunity set is less for Charter. And it may mean that, as you're hearing about in the press, the next administration may look to revisit it. How that would all work between Congress and the administration, Department of Commerce, I have no idea. I just read the same things you do.
Right, and I think it's a safe bet to say that satellite, the LEO projects, and one in particular may play a bigger role with this administration. How do you see? I mean, it's a question we're getting quite a bit now. I mean, how do you see competition from Starlink, from Kuiper? And maybe compare it to what we're seeing in fixed wireless.
I think it's capacity constrained. I would argue even more so than cell phone internet. But in a low-density environment, that capacity can be spread over a number of different homes just fine. And so we're building today at 10 homes per mile in our subsidized rural footprint. You can make the argument that anything below five or six really is going to be very difficult, not just from a construction standpoint and cost per passing, even with significant subsidies, but the ability to operate that plant and operate that footprint is hard because the operating costs are high just from the windshield time and pole rent and property tax, all that stuff that adds in. And so those areas probably are better served by low-Earth orbit satellite.
Because the capacity is constrained, but the distance is large, it can be spread over to provide, I think, decent service in those footprints.
Gotcha. So two quick financial topics in our remaining time here. First, cost structure. You've referenced a number of times all the investments you've made in the workforce, with training systems, including AI. How much margin expansion is left in the business as you look out sort of post those investments?
Essentially, we've made all those investments, the one-time step-ups in employee wages, training, progression, and so they'll continue to expand, but the run rate is built in, and then in the AI front, we're making significant investments in tools and systems that are designed almost less about the customer and more about helping the agent make the job a very good job for our agents, make it easy, make them a happier employee. Because of that, they stay longer. They have more tenure. If they have more tenure, handle time goes down, repeat rates go lower.
It's a vicious circle of that investment providing a better environment for employees, which provides a better level of service for our customers and puts us in a position where we're thinking about it in terms of how do you use AI and these investments to make the job better so that we can have more tenured employees who have happier customers on the other end. I think the runway is very long, to answer your question, in terms of the type of efficiencies that we can get through making the right types of investments.
Got it. And lastly, capital intensity. How do you see longer-term capital intensity in the cable business, given all the moving parts, and especially as we look beyond sort of network evolution and maybe even sort of lower sort of network expansion?
Historically, if you take a look and you exclude line extensions and you include network evolution, what you'll find is that the business as you know, core capital has either been stable as a percentage of revenue or declining. And so I think those trends continue to be the case. The business is becoming more efficient over time, not just in terms of operating costs, but also in terms of capital deployment. We've swapped out a lot of the video set-top boxes, as you mentioned, that causes dramatic reduction in the capital. On the other side, we're investing significantly in routers because of the importance of Wi-Fi and our strategic advantage there. But the net-net is, I think, our core capital continues to be reliable and decreasing as a percentage of capital intensity.
Sounds good. Chris, thanks for joining us.
Thanks for having me.