Good morning, everybody. Good morning to everyone who is joining us on the web this morning, for day two of the MoffettNathanson Media and Communications Conference. I am really excited to be joined by Steve Croney from Comcast. Comcast has been with us every year, since we started this summit, but it's our first time together, Steve.
Yep.
I wanna start just because I think you come with the role of CEO for the Connectivity & Platforms business from an interesting perspective in that you've been both the Chief Operating Officer and the Chief Financial Officer. Tell us how those two different perspectives shape what it is you want to accomplish at C&P, and the way you think about the turnaround that you're trying to achieve. You know, what are the things that you first saw that you wanted that you either saw or inherited that you wanted to change?
Yep, sure. First of all, thanks for having me.
Yeah.
It's great to be here. Yeah. I've been with the company for 35 years. Spent the first 20 years out in field operations, moved to headquarters the last 15 years. As you stated, spent quite a bit of time in the CFO role and about a year in the COO role. Know a lot about the business, know a lot about the company. What was really important is, had to bring a very different perspective, right? If we wanna change the trajectory of the business, want to deliver different outcomes, I had to think about it through a very different lens.
The way I approached it about a year ago when I, when I took over the COO role is I said, "What if we're acquiring Comcast?" Let me take it through that lens, true challenger mentality, and went through everything. Every process, every policy, all the operations, and just challenged everything that we did and said, "Why are we doing this? Should we continue to do it this way?" At the 50,000-foot level, I'd say the big three things that stood out to me were, first, we were not great at being honest with ourselves about our strengths, about our weaknesses. I needed to really clearly define our reality, and that's the competition. That is how we go to market. That is the structure of the company.
It's the talent within the company, our customer experience, really looking at things through that very different lens. Once I defined that reality, it was about developing a North Star. What is the business that we need to become? I think that was something we wasn't very clear, the team wasn't rallied around that. How do we build that true North Star, business we need to become?
What is the business that you need to become?
I think as you look at it is, I focus in three of the, once again, at the 50,000-foot level, focus on three core areas and one foundational area. It's the network. We have to have a much better network and develop differentiation with our network. Two is around the product side, really focused on Wi-Fi as the centerpiece, but how do we make our products better together?
It's interesting. You're defining the foundational product as Wi-Fi rather than broadband.
Absolutely. Wi-Fi, how do you make our products better when you have them together? Better streaming experiences, better mobile experiences through the Wi-Fi. From a customer experience perspective, you know, satisfaction is not enough. You have to build loyalty and advocacy, how do you do that? Through personalization and simplification, taking customer effort out of the business. Foundationally is our ways of working and really looking at that, and, you know, we have to have a challenger mentality. We gotta think very differently. Really focused on what are the things we need to do to have that challenger mentality. That's the North Star at the highest level. Once we, you know, developed the North Star, it was about how do we go and execute?
How do we align the organization? What are the very clear deliverables? I've spent the past four months, I've had 27 meetings talking to all of our leaders across the entire company on this is what we need to deliver, these are the objectives we need to deliver, and really focusing the team, you know, setting clear accountability, ownership, setting up the right KPIs and metrics so then we focus on that.
That's an interesting one. As I'm always fascinated by the KPIs and metrics.
Yeah
that you manage to. Have you made them longer term or shorter term?
It's a mix of both. I think that's important you balance both. you know, as we're rolling out 2026 in the execution plan, they're definitely more short term, but we tie it into the North Star, and where do we have to take those over the next couple of years? It's a balance of both.
Got it. Well, there's a lot there that we're gonna return to over the course of our conversation this morning. Before we dig into the individual silos of what I was gonna call broadband, but I'm gonna retitle it now as Wi-Fi. Before we think about the standalone pieces of the business.
Yeah
One of the things we've been focused on in this conference is convergence. How central is the idea of convergence to your strategy? Why does it matter? You know, you're seeing. Are you seeing customers think about convergence as a new product category, the connectivity everywhere? How do you think about your competitive position...
Yeah
...in convergence?
I'd say it's core to our entire strategy and core to the North Star strategy that I talked about. We are seeing purchase intent starting to pivot towards more.
Is that something more than just I get a better price, so I like the bundle, or is it?...
It's two things.
...people are starting to conceptualize-...
There.
...connectivity everywhere as a product?
Yeah, I think it's both. I think there's a value component to the, to the bundle when you put the two products together. Also, it's differentiated experiences. That's a key part of this. You know, a great example of that is, you know, when you connect to our Wi-Fi with Xfinity Mobile, it's 1 gig download speeds. That's differentiated product. We're continuing to try to differentiate the product. I think it's a combination of both. We've really rallied the organization around it. It, you know, it's all about convergence. It's that value proposition, the differentiated experiences, and we have a very strong hand. If you think about it, we have 65 million passings in the footprint, all have 1 gig plus speeds, all have a broadband offering. That's more than any of our competitors.
We're pivoting that towards multi-gig symmetrical. You have that same ubiquity across 65 million homes. We have the largest Wi-Fi network in the country, and we offload about 90% of the traffic. Once again, creates that great experience, like you said, inside the home, outside of the home. Beyond that too is those differentiated experiences and the great Wi-Fi experience that we have as well. We invest a lot in differentiating our Wi-Fi with, Opensignal just came out with a report saying we have the most reliable Wi-Fi in our footprints. You have the reliability piece, you have the differentiated piece I talked about with the mobile boost, differentiating that mobile experience. We have, you know, all the features of control and coverage within the home as well.
All that's very important, and that creates a much better mobile experience. With the, you know, the 90% offload, it enables a cost structure that where we can, you know, provide a great value to our customers. Our pricing on mobile is about half of our competitors', give or take, so you know, that works really well. Then the customer experience. It's a huge part of this, and we're continuing to invest and focus on the customer experience as well. Overall, we're well-positioned when it comes to convergence, and one of the core metrics that we look at is converged ARPA. You take your broadband revenues, your mobile service revenues over broadband customers. We're about $85 as it sits today. Roughly one half of where mobile ARPA is for our competitors. That's another huge opportunity for us as we go forward.
Then, you know, then you look to say in early innings, you look at our first quarter results, you know, we like what we saw. We saw connects improve. We saw voluntary disconnects improve. Our new packaging and pricing is resonating in a couple ways. One is it's, we're moving up tier, and we're getting more customers in our gig products, so our best broadband product. With the equipment included, now we're getting more customers taking our gateways to get all these great experiences that I just talked about and that great Wi-Fi experience. We've seen our NPS move up the right way, so that's a leading indicator for future benefit. Our mobile attach has accelerated significantly. We had our best quarter ever in the first quarter. It was 435,000 line net adds.
We have what it takes. It's all about execution, and, you know, I own that. I feel very confident where we're gonna go going forward.
I would imagine that all of those things that you talked about, ARPA and mobile attach rate and those things, are KPIs that you are holding people accountable for and measuring people.
Absolutely.
Yeah. Do you see this is kind of the future view of convergence, I guess. Do you see your fiber competitors eventually sort of going back to the '90s ILEC model of they're sort of you're competing against fortress Verizon in the Northeast, you're competing against fortress AT&T in the South and the West, but that it really goes back to the way it used to be 30 years ago of sort of regional phone competitors?
I don't. I think we control what we can control. That's what I'm focused on. To me, that's just about how do you create the best possible experience, bring the greatest value to customers? Hopefully you can knock down those walls as we go forward.
Are you seeing, for example, Verizon being the main competitor that you're up against now in the Northeast, or do you still think of it as, no, it's still FWA from T-Mobile?
I think we look at it all, right?
Yeah.
It's a combination of fiber, it's a combination of fixed wireless. You know, satellite is coming into the market. Yeah, we look at it all.
Let's talk about your go-to-market strategy in broadband or Wi-Fi.
Yeah.
One of the first things you did was simplify broadband pricing.
Yeah.
How does the adoption of simplified national pricing for broadband position you in the long run? Is there any risk that limits your flexibility to compete against regional competitors?
When you look at it was essential. We were way too complex. You know, that complexity led to a lack of trust, a lack of transparency, so we had to make the pivot. When you look at kind of how we're structured today, we have our value segment with Internet Essentials, we have four speed tiers that range from 300 Mbps up to 2 Gbps. For each of those tiers, we have three price points. We have a one-year, we have a five-year, and we have an everyday price, that everyday price we did adjust down. We were out of market, now we're in market when it comes to that price. Also from a simplicity perspective, we included the gateway in the packaging. All essential as we move forward.
To the second part of your question, free mobile line as well for anybody who takes our service, whether you're existing or new customer. To the second part of your question, we've maintained our flexibility, and I would argue that we're actually even more effective. The reason for that is, you know, over the past 18 months, we've done a really nice job leveraging our data in very different ways. We've created a lot of new data models, over 100 different data models. We have thousands of attributes, internal and external, that we leverage in those data models, and what that enables us to do is really target, whether it's markets, particular parts of markets, targets particular segments.
As we really dig into that, we run those models across acquisition, upsell, retention, win back, collection. We leverage that across the board, so it makes us much more effective in a much more fiscally responsible way. Secondarily is with the structural changes we made, we've significantly improved our velocity. What used to take us kind of weeks to months to react now takes us days, so that's hugely beneficial as well. We're in a good spot there.
You saw a 117,000 subscriber year-over-year improvement in broadband net losses.
Yeah.
About half of that was your Legendary February, but half of that was sort of sustainable, repeatable.
Yeah.
How much of that is coming from connectivity that is gross adds and how much of that is coming from lower voluntary churn? Where does lower voluntary churn stand, or voluntary churn stand?
Yeah
relative to the historic lows that you've seen?
Overall in the first quarter, we saw connect improvement, we saw voluntary disconnect improvement and that's been really solid over time. We saw improvement in fiber footprints, we saw improvement in non-fiber footprints. I haven't really focused on one particular metric. It was a broad improvement across the board. As you mentioned, you know, over 50% of that was tied into Legendary February, where it was a fantastic moment for us, and we really leaned into that. You know, there is an organic component to this as well. I go back to the new pricing and packaging. It was the biggest pivot we've made in the company's history when we did that last year. That is resonating.
On top of that, we've done a much better job. A new chief growth officer. We have a much better job of messaging, much better job of in our creative and telling our story. That's helped that throughout.
Just think about that, the pricing for a second.
Yeah.
Historically, the super low intro prices are obviously a magnet for accelerating gross adds. The problem is those customers churn off.
Yeah.
The risk I think all of us saw when you went to everyday low pricing or, price locks and things.
is, okay, that will help churn a year from now, two years from now, as those low-
Yeah
introductory rates would've rolled off. You're going to pay a price in new customer acquisition initially. Has it turned out that way?
No. The good news is we've moved up market. The way we've priced it, as you know, is, you know, five-year is a little more expensive than the one-year and as we look at that. You know, we've been very pleased with the early results. To your point, there will be benefits down the road tied to that packaging. Um, and one other area-
Yeah
to highlight that I, you know, we have spent a lot of time on top of the new pricing and packaging is we hired a new head of sales across the company. We've seen an improvement in our sales effectiveness. We, you know, back to evaluating every part of the business. You know, we need to do a better job from a training perspective, our employees from a compensation plan perspective, from a tooling perspective. All of that has played into this as well.
Give me one nugget of something that you changed for the sales channel that has made them more effective.
I'd say we leaned into convergence and mobile a lot more through our training, through our compensation.
So it's fir-
It's-
first-
Yeah
First sell
Yeah
Try to get people onto the
Yeah
Converge platform.
Going back to leveraging our data, leveraging our marketing tech stack, all of that weighs into that sales effectiveness as well. We put a lot of time and effort into that.
I, you know, the intense competitive environment and that phrase, intense competitive environment, is something that we now hear all the time on every conference call. The broad characterization I think is fiber competing at the high end, FWA and maybe soon satellite competing at the price end of the market. The... What's priced into your stock price is that you will decline forever, and that penetration's going to the 20s. Why is that wrong? Help us. Give us a picture of where you think the market ultimately shakes out.
Yeah. I think first and foremost is we have to, you know, we are operating under the condition that fiber will continue to build. Now how, you know, how deep they take that will be dependent on their build economics and returns. Fiber will continue to build. Fixed wireless will continue to be aggressive. Obviously satellite will be in the market in some capacity. I think that's essential. I'd say good news is back to the pricing and packaging and what we've done, that is resonating and we're competing well on the low end with our 300 meg product. Competing well on the high end with our gig product. Where we spend a lot of our time is focused on what's the end state, and our belief is in the end state.
There's gonna be two multi-gig providers to the side of the home. And, you know, and obviously fixed wireless and satellite will continue to be active. That's a bit of the end state. If you think about the end state, you know, we've competed with fiber for 20 years. We know they take share early. You know, over time both share and ARPU come to kind of overall market norms.
An equilibrium.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. We know that. From a fixed wireless perspective, you know, it's different. Where I'd say they did really well is simplicity, ease. They did a great job there, and that's a lot of what we've leaned into with all the investment we're making, is how do we simplify, make it easier for our customers to install, to do business with us. Big focus there. Becomes very tactical as well, is back to leveraging the data in all those models. How do you go after the value-conscious customer? Leverage our performance. Win back is a big part of that. Then we look at satellite. I think everything that Emery doing is gonna benefit us against satellite.
I'd say in reference to, you know, fixed wireless and satellite, you know, our network is, you know, by far exceeds what they have, and they are capacity constrained. If you look at that, for me, you know, the more bits the better. We want usage is up 10% on, you know, overall for our broadband-only customers. Upstream is up even more. When you look at the usage patterns, you know, it used to be we know certain nights of the week or certain times. Now it's very driven by gaming, you know, new gaming launches, sporting events. It's very choppy, which I think it benefits us as well. You know, we have this great advantage and opportunity with our network.
You know, to answer your question in the end state, I mean, we feel good. We've competed with fiber for a long time, it's just continuing to differentiate ourselves. Once again, the Wi-Fi experience, the network, all of that, make sure that we're competitive from a pricing and packaging perspective. Better customer experience. We know increased NPS scores, you know, leads to less churn, the mobile component of this all. Is the convergence and the value proposition tied to mobile is essential as we go forward.
You've called 2026 an investment year for broadband. Part of that was you didn't take a price increase.
Nope
This year. Is 27 a return to normal? Is 3% or 4% ARPU growth long term, which used to be your North Star for how to think about ARPU growth for the standalone product? Is that still the right way to think about it?
As you step back, you know, back to the point, we were not competitive in the market. Not only were we complex, we were not competitive from a price perspective in the marketplace, so it was essential that we did what we had to do. You know, you go back to when we did that mid-last year, we said we'd feel pressure on ARPU as we turn into the new year, some incremental pressure in the second quarter, and then we'd start to see relief as we come out of the year. The big drivers of that were, you know, what you touched on. A piece of it was we didn't take the rate increase. Secondarily was the free wireless lines and the way counting recognition works, that impacts broadband ARPU.
The third is some additional transactional activity from our base as people moved into the new packages. You step back and you say, "Okay, now let's look forward. You know, what do we have?" Is one, you know, that incremental transactional activity will lap itself, and over time, to the point you made earlier, should actually start to diminish because more people are locked in. Two, we have flexibility on pricing, so we maintain that flexibility as we go forward. A big part of it is on the mobile free line. When you look at the mobile free lines, early cohorts are starting to happen, but we're seeing the significant majority of those customers roll. That becomes accretive to broadband as well.
Just having more mobile in general becomes accretive over time, just with, as we sell in new services, et cetera. There, there's a lot there. Then, you know, like I said, the mix has shifted as we sold into our new pricing and packaging. We're selling more gig tiers, you know, over 40% now. That's another benefit as we go forward. You know, I think it'll continue to move. As I touched on this concept of converged ARPA, you know, one big component of that is broadband and the broadband revenue. Another big component is how do we improve our sell into new customers, to our existing broadband base? How do we improve sell in of more mobile lines to our existing mobile customers?
Last two quarters, 30% of our line that adds came from existing mobile customers.
Yeah.
Adding more lines.
You know, the point that you made.
Yeah
Your ARPA is half of what the mobile-only ARPA is for your competitors speaks to, some of that is the introductory discounts.
Yeah.
Most of that is just you've got fewer lines per account.
Lower penetra.
Yeah. How are you thinking about raising the, not just the attach rate, but also the number of lines per account?
I'd say the one thing that's been great about the free line offering, you know, being transparent, I wish we would have done it sooner, but you know, we're in that game now. What it does is allows our customers to test out the product and it drives awareness with the product. Like I said, once we get the folks in, we spend a lot of our time on lifecycle management. Is those free lines and like I said, the early cohorts, a significant majority of the customers are rolling to paid.
Yeah, I was gonna say, those customers who are rolling to paid, are you seeing any particular churn issues with those customers or-?
We are not. We feel one of the big components of that is, you think about they're rolling from zero, but they're rolling to $30, $40, which is still less-
Which is still less than anything.
Exactly. About half of what else they can get. You go back into the old days when we had the low broadband offers and we were rolling EDPs that are well above market. We saw that churn.
Yeah
We saw that pain. We're not seeing that as much. Back to the point of, you know, as we manage that lifecycle management, you know, we're looking at porting, we're looking at usage, we're looking at how many customers are in equipment installment plans. We're looking at the premium sell-in. You know, our premium product is fantastic. A big one is those incremental number of lines. As I said, you know, to take 30% of our, you know, record-setting mobile line net adds are coming from existing mobile customers adding more. Once they get in with the free line, they say, "Hey, I'm bring my next line.
Yeah, I was gonna say.
Bring my next line.
Is that the dynamic you're seeing?
That's what we're focused on.
It's a kind of let me try it out, make sure the water's warm, and then if it is, I'll bring my kids and my spouse.
Exactly
The rest of the family aboard.
The VIPs are up. Yeah, exactly right.
The day before you reported results, you introduced new mobile plans.
Yeah.
For example, they included device insurance.
Yeah.
Which is an interesting wrinkle. It's a profit center for some that is a profit pool that you can attack. Is that, is that resonating with customers? What kind of response have you seen from customers so far?
It is. If you take a step back and you go back about a year, we knew there was a big TAM in the premium marketplace, and we just didn't have the right product. We didn't have the feature-rich product that people are looking for. About a year ago, we introduced our premium unlimited product, and that was, you know, you get the 1 gig download speeds, but you get 4K streaming, anytime device upgrades, simplified international plans. We got to about 30% sales, so we're really pleased. It was, you know, well above what we had modeled. Then we said, "Okay, how do we further disrupt that? How do we drive more of that premium penetration?" You know, there's benefits to that from a churn perspective, from a revenue perspective. We said, "You know what?
No one has ever done this. Let's include device protection. We think, you know, a good chunk of our competitors' customers take a device protection plan, probably in the $10-$20 range. That's incremental value for our customers and another way to position that product. It just, you know, just came out, but, you know, our expectation is that we improve upon that 30% number.
Can you say what the sell-in rate is for new gross adds into your broadband product? What percentage of them are taking wireless along with the broadband?
I don't know.
Look at Marcy.
Yeah, I gotta look at Marcy on that one.
What you have to say.
I don't think we've talked about that one yet, so I won't, I won't go there.
Okay.
I won't go there specifically yet.
You haven't said the But.
Obviously it's improving.
Yeah.
If you see in our results
Your overall market-...
Yes
...market share...
Yes
...is still in this in the mid-single digits...
Yeah.
...we've looked at the share of gross ads...
Yeah
...making assumptions about churn, would say your share of gross ads is in the 20% range. There's a long runway there.
Yeah.
The question is.
It's not that.
Are you seeing that at the front edge of?
Yeah, and I would say-
What's next?
I would say when we, you know, we released, you know, 16% of our broadband customers have mobile. If you take it down to mobile lines in our footprint, we're probably about 6 and a half percent.
Right.
We have.
That's exactly right.
we have a massive runway. That's what we're focused on.
So y- y- you know-
But-
your predecessor, when I would be on the stage.
Yeah
it with Dave over the last 10 years, it was pretty clear that he viewed broadband more as a defensive strategy to protect or sorry, wireless.
Yeah.
More as a defensive strategy to protect broadband than as a revenue-generating opportunity in itself. It's obviously both, but what do you see it as first? Is this first and foremost playing offense and trying to grow the revenues of the business by adding a new product line, or is it primarily about trying to protect the broadband business?
I'd say unequivocally it's about playing offense. It is our, you know, number one priority as we push forward. It's standalone, it's a firmly profitable product. We had a couple of options. One is you can, you know, maximize the short-term profitability, or we can invest some of the profitability, you know, to create the value that we've created to drive mobile lines, to create a much better mobile, a converged experience. With a roughly $200 billion TAM in the mobile space, you know, we've definitely chosen the latter. We're gonna make those investments and as we move forward.
As it relates to the profitability of the product, obviously a big part of the profitability is how much of the traffic you can offload onto Wi-Fi and how much of the traffic you can offload onto CBRS. Can you just talk about those two things?
Yeah
and the progress-
Yeah
The vision that
Yeah
have for those two things?
We've said about 90% is offloaded onto Wi-Fi. As I mentioned before, the nation's largest Wi-Fi network and it creates a much better experience for our customers, back to the 1 gig of download speed when you attach to our Wi-Fi. We do have many markets up with CBRS and we look at that once again, on a just a cost to build and does it make sense and based on the densities, et cetera. That's some additional offload that's included in the overall 90% number.
Where does that fit in your priority stack? 'Cause I have a question coming up about your network upgrades.
Yeah.
But there are obviously issues of just how much-
Yeah
work, labor you have and what do you-
Yeah
tell them to do first. Where does CBRS fit in the priorities?
I think we look at it, you know, if there's a great return on it, we'll go ahead and put up some, you know, cell site. If, if not, we, you know It's all balanced across the broader piece. I would say the general overall network evolution is prioritized over the CBRS.
And I, and I realize-
'cause our offload is so good on Wi-Fi as it sits.
I realize I characterized it wrong in that I called it offload, and I think one of the things that you guys have done a good job at is articulating a strategy that it's not offload, it's Wi-Fi first.
Exactly.
It's the component that goes over the cellular.
Yeah
network that is the offload.
You're exactly right.
Yeah.
That's the way we look at it, you know, kind of the inside and outside of the home. I think we, you know, we're And then addition on the cost, so you get that cost benefit. You know, we're selling to our existing broadband customers, so the cost of that is less expensive. That's what's enabled us to, you know, create this great value proposition at about half the rate of our competitors.
Do you have a vision?
resonating with our customers.
where you have CBRS strand mounted small cells sort of ubiquitously across your denser markets.
You know, yeah, I don't know that we fully get it. It totally depends on the 'Cause the offload, the Wi-Fi offload is so good, so does it add the extra value that we want? We assess on a case by case basis.
Got it. Let's talk about video for a second.
Yeah.
Your video subscriber losses have eased, but not, you know, you're still contracting.
Yeah
9.5% annual rate. Charter's gotten that down to 1.3% rate of decline, something that I think most of the people in the room never would have thought was possible to see again. Is there a reason you haven't replicated that kind of offering of the free streaming services along with the traditional video packages? Is it simply a matter of timing and your programming agreements and that you'll get there along the way?
I think the way we look at it is, you know, it's convergence first. Obviously for a segment of the market, video is very relevant, we focus more on giving our customers optionality and control. When you look at it, you know, we've simplified our video packages just as we have with our broadband packages. We have, you know, some skinnier bundles in our now construct, we have four linear packages that now have fees and the primary set-top box included. Underneath that though, we've really leaned into bundling of apps.
We had one we called StreamSaver app, we now have 12, and it includes anywhere between three, four, and five apps, and mixes of those in those bundles, but provides a value to the customer of about 25%-40%. Once again, back to this optionality and giving the customer choice, but we also make that available not only to our video customers, but to our broadband customers as well. It's another value component. With broadband. When you think about Wi-Fi, you know, you're creating a great Wi-Fi streaming experience, 4K, et cetera. We provide that optionality.
I think when you really think about it, we always look at profitability by every one of our products and where we want to invest and what drives the biggest benefit for broadband and for mobile. That's how we look at it.
I would imagine the churn rate of customers who are in those video packages, their broadband churn rate is meaningfully lower.
It's lower, yeah.
is that fair to assume?
Yeah.
So-
Same with the streaming as well.
It sort of works the same way as wireless does, that the deeper the relationship, the better the churn rate.
Exactly. What we have seen is, you know, like you said, we have seen improvement. We had, you know, over 100,000 better in the first quarter, and I think it was our best first quarter from since the first quarter of 2019. It's moving in the right direction, just a different approach.
Business services never quite gets the attention it deserves. There's always been a fair amount of attention and acknowledgement of your SMB business. But you're still reasonably new in the enterprise market. Can you just talk about the enterprise market for a second, if I think about all the connectivity opportunities that are rising in data centers.
Yeah
What have you, how are you competing in that, and even thinking about positioning.
Yeah
for edge inference and for AI and that sort of thing?
That's great. Amen. I agree with you 100% that it is, it's undervalued. If you think about our overall business services segment, $10 billion of revenue, roughly $60 billion marketplace, it's approaching 25% of our connectivity revenues, running at a 55% margin, and we've been significantly outperforming our competitors and peers when it comes to growth. To your point, a big, you know, SMB, we're the, you know, largest provider of, to SMB businesses in the country. To your point, where a lot of the momentum and growth is coming in is in the mid-market and enterprise space. What we're really focused on there is selling solutions. Connectivity's foundational, but it's selling solutions.
One of the metrics we look at is for every $1 of connectivity, we now sell in $0.70 of solutions. If you go back a few years, it was 1/3 of that. It's a big area of focus, and that's where we spend a lot of our time innovating. You know, we've taken on smaller acquisitions along the way to fill either whether it's capabilities or, you know, products that we don't have. Masergy and Nitel are examples of that. We're gonna continue to drive that forward, and our goal there is to take a, you know, much bigger share of the, of, you know, the Fortune 500's communication spend. We do serve most of those customers. We have an opportunity to take more of that spend.
To the second part of your question, we're looking at a lot of different options. I think the, you know, our network and the intelligence we built in the network and how we built our network, along with, we have thousands of edge facilities, hubs and headends and along the way. That provides a great opportunity, to your point, to provide, you know, bring AI solutions closer to the customer, provide different experiences for our customers tied into that. It's an area we're leaning into, you know, similar with data centers and connectivity to the data center. We're spending a lot of time in that space, but we do think that's gonna be a big opportunity for us as we move forward.
You just talked about the opportunity created by the infrastructure and the plan.
Yeah.
If I just look at your stock prices, the market believes that your infrastructure is inferior and that ultimately, I guess the narrative would be that you're gonna have to eventually upgrade to fiber, and HFC is gonna come to the end of its life cycle. Why is that wrong?
Yeah. What I would say is if you really look at our end state, you know, full duplex DOCSIS 4.0, there isn't anything a fiber path, you know, fiber competitive that we can't from a network perspective. You look at our network overall, it'll be ubiquitous. There's flexibility in the network, intelligence in the network. It still has active devices, which is really important as we go forward. You look at overall total cost of ownership, we're in a really good spot. You start with capital. Cost is about $200 a passing, 1/7 to 1/10 of a fiber passing as you get the drop to the side of the home.
You know, from an OpEx perspective, maybe $1-$2 more, but, you know, we'll take that trade-off any day because that's the power going to the active devices, and those active devices enable the intelligence that we're putting into the network. Core to that intelligence is, if you think about it, our nodes, our amplifiers, all the way down to the gateway, AI-capable chips. The telemetry we can build upon that. We fully virtualize the network as well. You know, we're, you know, we're looking at self-healing that's going on through the amplifier.
Yeah, I was gonna say, that's really important for repair and maintenance, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
You look at, yeah, you know, being proactive with our customers. We can predict much better than we ever have. You look at some of the early metrics on our end state, you know, trouble calls are down 15%. Our time to repair is down 35%. We know exactly where the issue is. Impaired devices on the network is down 50%, 'cause we can get ahead of that and work the plan. There's a lot of power in that. You know, with all that, the AI that's in the network, just being able to optimize the experience, the Wi-Fi experience all the way down to the customer level. There is a tremendous amount of value and power in that.
I think, you know, we're 60% of the way there as we sit here today, less on the end state.
That's just in, with the, with the split strategy, but not with DOCSIS.
Yeah, that DOCSIS 4.0 deployments are starting to accelerate. You have the. With amplifiers we're kind of the long pole in the tent. We now have those, we're out enabling that back to our mid-splits, as well as on anything new that we're building. As we get to scale, we'll finally be able to you know, we'll market multi-gig symmetrical. We'll be able to market the intelligence. We'll be able to market the low latency. All these things that we have yet to be able to do that, which will happen, as we get through the end of this year.
You know, I'm always fascinated in finding naturally occurring experiments that sort of point the direction of where we're going. You have a lot of your plant, like every cable operator does, that's FTTH already.
Most of them, yeah.
Where you've been doing edge outs and rural builds and that sort of thing.
Most of the plant is fiber as well, it's just not the drop right now.
Yeah. Do you see, if I think of the three cohorts of already finished with the mid-splits, already FTTH because it was built after a storm or what have you.
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
The rest of your plant, are you seeing real differences in the way customers think about those geographies?
Not so much as we sit here today, and I think a lot of it is we just haven't marketed the capabilities.
Marketed it, yeah.
Do the customers know? You know, obviously we let them know that, hey, the mid-splits here, you got additional downloads. You know, so you get there's some slight benefits there, but it's gonna be as we get out into market, that's where it's gonna really take hold.
Yeah. Last question, I guess, is the one that everybody is most focused on, which is just when can you grow again, and how can you grow again? Make the case for how Comcast returns to being a growing business.
A growth company.
This, at least C&P becomes, returns to a growing business.
Absolutely. We've talked about it. We're in a deliberate investment cycle, right? We invested in a lot of rate to become much more competitive in that space. We've invested a lot on the expense side as well, from a customer experience perspective, a product perspective, a go to market strategy perspective. You know, all of that with time we'll lap. If you look at the fundamentals and the foundation, is tremendous demand for broadband, right? That usage continues to grow.
Yeah.
It's essential in people's lives. You know, intermingle the terms, but, you know, really around that Wi-Fi experience in the home. That's a big positive for us. You look at our converged strategy. We have a tremendous value proposition, differentiated both on price, but also on the experience and what we bring with Wi-Fi, and how we can differentiate that mobile experience and differentiate other products in the home with the great Wi-Fi experiences that we've created. Business services we touched on. You know, $10 billion business, great runway for growth. We're proving that we are growing in that space, that's a, you know, that's another significant opportunity for us. Tied into convergence piece is mobile.
Continue to penetrate mobile. As we talked about, you add more lines in, you add more premium services in, you have a huge benefit coming in from mobile. Another one we haven't talked a lot about, I've focused on as we came in, is, you know, we're doing a better job of leveraging the totality of the company. Matt Strauss, who is the CEO of NBC Media, I have been working very, very closely together on Project Harmony. It's an always-on approach just to leverage all the assets within the company. You saw that a little bit with Legendary February.
Yeah, I was gonna say.
And some of the IP-
Legendary February is a.
You know.
Is an interesting proof point, yeah.
It takes all the impressions we got and how we can leverage data in different ways. There's value in that. From a cost perspective, right? As we're improving the experience and all these things we're doing from a network perspective, that's taking costs out of the business. You're gonna have that as a tailwind as well, and we're continuing to look at the structure of the company and just, you know, continuing to gain efficiencies and building more effectiveness along the way as well. You know, there's a lot there. It's, we have a great hand and it goes back to we just need to execute, but I'm confident we'll get there.
All right. Well, it's a good place to end it. I thank you for spending the time with us this morning. I think all of us wish you great success in your new role and with the turnaround that you're trying to pull off at Comcast.
Well, thank you. I appreciate you having me here, Craig.
Thank you.
This was a great time. Thank you.