Competition

The contested map

Charter sells connectivity to 58 million homes and businesses across 41 states under the Spectrum brand [1]. It does not compete for those homes against one rival on one axis. Its own filings describe five distinct contests, each with a different named opponent set: residential Internet against fiber-to-the-home builders and fixed wireless carriers; mobile against the three national network operators; video against satellite, virtual MVPDs and programmer streaming apps; voice against wireless substitution; and commercial services against telecom carriers, metro fiber operators and managed-service providers [2] [3].

Two features of this run's evidence base shape what follows. First, Charter quantifies its own overbuild exposure: the 10-K states, every year, what share of its operating footprint each named terrestrial broadband rival reaches. That is an unusually direct disclosure and it forms the spine of this tab. Second, this tab reads the contest from Charter's side of it: everything attributed to a rival below is sourced from Charter's filings, exhibits and calls, and is labelled as such. Two rivals speak in their own voice here. Cox Communications' audited financial statements and its own business-and-competition description are filed inside Charter's Cox merger proxy, so a genuine cable peer's numbers are on the record. And AT&T's own 10-K is used once below, where it puts a figure on a product Charter's management describes but does not size. The rivals' 10-Ks and transcripts — AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Comcast, Altice USA and Cable One — are indexed in this run and read in Competitors; arena structure and value-chain economics belong to Industry.

Sources: 2Q26 trending schedule, Customer Metrics [4]; FY2025 Form 10-K, Competition [5].

Who competes where

The clearest company-authored roster of rivals is not in the 10-K. It is Schedule 1 to Charter's executive employment agreements, which enumerates, product line by product line, the companies Charter's own employment agreements name as competitors for non-compete purposes: video and Internet access on the first page [6], voice and data, wireless and advertising on the second [7]. The table below maps the principal names from that schedule against the segments described in the FY2025 10-K.

Sources: Employment Agreement Schedule 1, video and Internet activities [8] and voice, wireless and advertising activities [9]; FY2025 Form 10-K, Competition [10] [11].

One entry in that table carries a structural complication. Verizon is both the rival whose fiber reaches the largest share of Charter's footprint after AT&T and the carrier whose cellular network Spectrum Mobile rides: Charter's mobile service leverages "the cellular network of Verizon Communications Inc." for nationwide coverage, including 5G and international roaming [12]. Comcast sits in a similar double position: named in the Internet, video, voice and advertising schedules, and in 2025 a counterparty that agreed to carry Spectrum News to its own video customers in California, Connecticut, northern New Jersey, Orlando and Tampa [13].

The overbuild Charter measures

Every 10-K since FY2021 states the share of Charter's operating footprint reached by its named terrestrial broadband rivals. The series is not continuous: the FY2024 filing raised the speed threshold from 25 Mbps to the FCC's 100 Mbps definition, which mechanically cut the reported percentages, and the FY2025 filing stops naming Frontier at all while Verizon's disclosed reach jumps from 6% to 16%.

Sources: FY2021 Form 10-K [14]; FY2022 [15]; FY2023 [16]; FY2024 [17]; FY2025 [18]. FY2021–FY2023 measured at 25 Mbps and above; FY2024–FY2025 at the FCC's 100 Mbps definition.

Three facts sit in that chart. Combined disclosed reach of the named FTTH rivals was 48 points of footprint in FY2021 and 43 points in FY2025, but the FY2024 threshold change makes the two ends non-comparable; on the consistent 100 Mbps basis the total moved from 40 points in FY2024 to 43 in FY2025. Frontier was named a primary FTTH competitor in each filing from FY2021 through FY2024 [19] and does not appear anywhere in the FY2025 10-K. In the same filing Charter writes that "consolidations in the telecom industry continue to increase competition as they seek to offer converged connectivity services similar to ours" [20]. The filings do not state that Frontier's overlap moved into Verizon's line; the disclosure change and the 10-point rise in Verizon's reported reach are what the record shows.

Fixed wireless is disclosed differently — by presence rather than by percentage. The FY2022 and FY2023 10-Ks described "several national mobile network operators" offering LTE or 5G home Internet "in our markets" [21] [22]; the FY2024 filing renamed the product "cell phone home Internet service (fixed wireless access from cell phone towers)" [23]. Speaking to investors in May 2025, Charter's CEO put the mobile-broadband overlap at the maximum: "we have AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile in 100% of our footprint. We have satellite everywhere we operate" [24]. AT&T's own 10-K sizes its side of that product: 1.5 million AT&T Internet Air connections at December 31, 2025, of which 875,000 were added during the year [25]. Neither company discloses how much of that base sits inside Charter's footprint.

Cox: a peer's own numbers

Cox Communications is the rival that speaks most fully in its own voice in this corpus, because Charter's merger proxy carries Cox's audited financial statements and Cox's own description of its business and its competition. Cox describes itself as "the largest private broadband company in the United States," operating fiber-powered networks in more than 30 states [26]. It runs the same model as Charter: HFC and fiber broadband, video, a commercial division, an advertising sales arm, and a mobile product provided under Cox's own MVNO rights over a major network operator's wireless network [27].

Source: Cox Communications, Inc. audited Consolidated Statements of Operations, filed in Charter's Cox transaction proxy [28].

Cox's revenue fell in each year of the audited series, from $13,542 million in 2022 to $13,073 million in 2024, and its operating income fell 15% in 2024 to $2,550 million [29]. Cox's own Adjusted EBITDA was $5,065 million in 2023 and $4,939 million in 2024, on the definition Cox uses [30]. In the first quarter of 2025 Cox revenue fell 4% year over year to $3,183 million while Adjusted EBITDA was flat at $1,261 million [31].

Sources: Charter FY2025 Form 10-K, revenue and Adjusted EBITDA [32]; Charter 2Q26 trending schedule, 1Q25 customer metrics [33]; Cox audited statements [34] and MD and A [35]; Cox customer counts as of March 31, 2025 [36]; passings and customers per the May 2025 transaction presentation [37]. Charter and Cox Adjusted EBITDA are each company's own non-GAAP definition and are not stated to be computed alike. The 1Q25 passings and customer figures are the transaction presentation's, on Charter's pre-revision customer-statistic basis; on the revised basis used elsewhere on this tab Charter's 1Q25 relationships were 32,160 thousand [38].

Cox's own competition section names the same opponents Charter names, in the same order of prominence: "AT&T, Lumen, Verizon, Frontier, and other fiber overbuilders, small incumbent local exchange carriers, and municipal and utility-owned providers" in broadband; DirecTV and Dish in video; "AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Dish" for Cox Mobile [39] [40]. Charter is not among them. That absence is the point Charter's CEO makes about the deal: "We don't have any real overlapping footprint between the 2 companies" [41]. Two US cable operators of this size are not rivals for the same household; they are rivals for the same national business accounts and the same advertising budgets, two of the lines on which Charter's own non-compete schedule names Cox [42].

Cox Enterprises is to receive $21.9 billion of consideration [43]; Charter is obligated to fund $4.0 billion of cash and expects to assume approximately $12.6 billion of Cox net debt and finance leases [44]. On the July 2026 call, management said it was "now hoping to close in mid- to late August" [45]. On the same competitive read Charter applies to itself, it describes the Cox footprint as "over 50% overbuilt with fiber," and "not that dissimilar from Charter" [46].

Where the units are moving

Charter's product-unit record separates cleanly into three trajectories. Internet peaked at 30.6 million customers at the end of 2023 and has declined since; video has fallen in every year shown; mobile lines have more than tripled.

Sources: FY2021 Form 10-K [47]; FY2022 [48]; FY2023 [49]; FY2024 [50]; FY2025 [51]. Charter revised its customer-statistic definitions in 4Q25; on the revised basis 2024 Internet customers were 30,083 and mobile lines 9,858.

Penetration of Charter's own passings is the measure least affected by definition changes, because both numerator and denominator come from the same schedule. It has fallen in every quarter since the start of 2024 while the footprint kept growing.

Source: 2Q26 trending schedule, Customer Metrics [52].

Passings rose from 55.7 million to 59.0 million over those ten quarters — roughly 3.3 million new homes, of which the subsidized rural build accounts for part — while relationships fell from 32.6 million to 31.5 million [53]. Charter has spent $7.7 billion since 2022 on that rural initiative and activated approximately 1.3 million passings, with over $2 billion of support awarded through RDOF and other federal, state and municipal grants including BEAD [54].

The quarterly net-addition series shows the three products moving in different directions at the same time.

Source: 2Q26 trending schedule, Customer Metrics [55].

Video net additions turned positive in 4Q25 for the first time in the series, at 44,000, after Charter completed deals with major programmers to include streaming applications in Spectrum TV packages at no additional cost and launched the Spectrum App Store [56]. Mobile net additions fell in seven consecutive quarters from the 2Q24 peak of 552,000 to 368,000 in 1Q26, before recovering to 406,000 in 2Q26. Internet losses widened again in 2026: 172,000 in the second quarter, which management described as "higher than a year ago, similar to what we saw in the first quarter," attributing it to soft gross additions rather than churn — "Softer gross additions remains the primary driver of our Internet customer growth weakness, while churn remained largely unchanged" [57].

Price and revenue by contested product

Revenue by product line separates the price effect from the unit effect. Internet revenue rose through 2025 on rate while units fell, then turned down in 2026; video revenue has fallen in eight of the ten quarters; mobile service revenue has risen every quarter.

Source: 2Q26 trending schedule, Revenue, Expenses and Adjusted EBITDA [58].

Monthly residential revenue per customer peaked at $120.07 in 1Q25 and was $117.52 in 2Q26 [59]. Charter's pricing response to the mobile-network operators is explicit and named: management says it runs "a savings guarantee against AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon; we guarantee $1,000 of savings," and that competitors offering savings guarantees "don't do that against us" [60]. The same $1,000 guarantee, plus price locks available when mobile and video are included, was described as a driver of net promoter score in July 2026 [61].

Share in fiber-overlap markets: what is disclosed and what is characterized

Charter does not publish market share. It characterizes it. The distinction matters because the two categories of statement below are of different evidentiary weight: the unit and revenue series above are disclosed; the share statements are management's description of internal data that is not in the filings.

Sources: Q1 FY2025 call [62]; DEFA14A May 16 2025 [63]; Q4 FY2025 call [64]; Q1 FY2026 call [65]; Q2 FY2026 call [66].

The most specific of these is the FY2025 call, where management put a magnitude on a new overbuild: the impact "tends to be limited to a few percentage points of Internet penetration during the first year of a new overbuilt vintage," and added that Charter does "not see overbuilders reaching their ROI goals within our footprint now or in the future" [67]. Against that, the disclosed series shows penetration of passings falling 5.1 points across ten quarters while the named rivals' disclosed reach rose. Both statements can hold at once — new-vintage overbuild is incremental, and the cumulative stock of overbuilt homes is what moves the penetration line — but the filings do not disclose the split, and Charter never publishes its own penetration inside those overlap markets. No rival reports its results on Charter's footprint either, so the claim cannot be checked against a disclosed number from any side.

On satellite, the company's read as of April 2026 was that "our tracking in data doesn't suggest a significant customer share loss to satellite," with the qualification that "in some subsidized rural markets, we may have seen satellite precede us" [68].

The terms that govern switching

Charter's residential business is structured to make leaving easy and to pay for arriving. The filings disclose no minimum term for residential connectivity; the contractual friction sits in device financing, bulk property agreements, commercial contracts and the municipal franchise.

Sources: FY2025 Form 10-K — products and customer commitments [69]; pricing, device plans, Phone Balance Buyout and community agreements [70]; Verizon MVNO [71]; franchises [72]; commercial contract terms and revenue recognition [73]; bulk MDU unit counting [74]; programming and app inclusion [75].

Two of these terms run in opposite directions. The Phone Balance Buyout program pays down balances on lines ported in from another carrier, which lowers the cost for a rival's customer to switch to Charter [76]. The franchise structure runs the other way for Charter: franchises are non-exclusive, granted for fixed terms and subject to renewal, and franchising authorities "can grant additional franchises to competitors in the same geographic area or operate their own cable systems" [77].

Where switching cost does appear in Charter's own numbers, it is behavioural rather than contractual. Management quantified it in July 2026: Internet customers who also buy mobile "churn nearly 40% less" than those who do not, and Internet customers who buy video "churn over 40% less"; mobile penetration of Internet customers was about 20%, at just under two lines per mobile customer [78]. Of eligible video customers, 55% had activated at least one included streaming app, averaging more than four apps [79]. Those are retention statistics disclosed on a call, not terms in a contract, and no contract in this corpus binds a residential customer for a period.

Evidence gaps in this record

Three limits are worth stating plainly for anyone building on this tab. Almost every figure attributed to AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Comcast, Frontier or the satellite and streaming names above comes from Charter's own filings, exhibits or calls; the exceptions are Cox, whose audited statements are filed within Charter's merger proxy, and AT&T's fixed wireless connection count above. The rivals' own 10-Ks and transcripts are indexed in this run and are read in Competitors, but none of them reports results on Charter's footprint, so they cannot settle a share question inside it. The web-research phases for this run did not complete, so no external market-share series is available. And Charter revised its customer-statistic definitions in the fourth quarter of 2025, adding mobile-only customers and a connectivity-customer measure and restating prior periods; the multi-year unit chart above therefore joins two definitional bases, with the revised 2024 figures noted in its caption [80].