Comcast Corp (CMCSA) May 2026 Conference Transcript

Good morning, everybody, and good morning to everyone who is joining us on the web this morning for day two of the Moffitt-Nathanson Media and Communications Conference. I am really excited to be joined by Steve Crony from Comcast. Comcast has been with us every year since we started this summit, but it's our first time together, Steve. So I want to start just because I think you come at the role of CEO for the connectivity and platforms business from an interesting perspective in that you've been both the chief operating officer and the chief financial officer. So 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 to, that you either saw or inherited that you wanted to change?

Yep, sure.

And first of all, thanks for having me.

It's great to be here. So, yeah, so I've been with the company for 35 years. Spent the first 20 years on 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. So, know a lot about the business, know a lot about the company. but what was really important is had to bring a very different perspective right if you want to change the trajectory of the business want to deliver different outcomes I had to think about it through a very different lens and the way I approached it about a year ago when I took over the COO role is I said what if we're acquiring Comcast let me take it through that lens the 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? And 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, and 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, then it was about developing a North Star. What is the business that we need to become? I think that was something that wasn't very clear, and the team wasn't rallied around that. So how do we build that true North Star business we need to become? And once you have that... And what is the business that you need to become? I think as you look at it, it is, I focus in three, 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 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?

So it's interesting. So you're defining the foundational product as Wi-Fi rather than broadband.

Absolutely. Wi-Fi, and then how do you make our products better when you have them together, better streaming experiences, better mobile experiences through the Wi-Fi. And then from a customer experience perspective, you know, satisfaction is not enough. You have to build loyalty and advocacy, and how do you do that through personalization and simplification, taking customer effort out of the business. And then foundationally is our ways of working and really looking at that and, you know, we have to have a challenger mentality. We've got to think very differently, so really focused on what are the things we need to do to have that challenger mentality. So that's the North Star at the highest level. And then once, you know, we've developed the North Star, then 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. I'm always fascinated by the KPIs and metrics 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. As we're rolling out 26 in the execution plan, they're definitely more short-term, but we tie it into the North Star. Where do we have to take those over the next couple of years? So it's a balance of both.

Well, there's a lot there that we're going to return to over the course of our conversation this morning. Before we dig into the individual silos of what I was going to call broadband, but I'm going to retitle it now as Wi-Fi, But before we think about the standalone pieces of the business, one of the things we've been focused on in this conference is convergence. How central is the idea of convergence to your strategy, and why does it matter? So are you seeing customers think about convergence as a new product category, the connectivity everywhere? And how do you think about your competitive position in convergence?

I'd say it's core to our entire strategy and core to the North Star strategy that I talked about. And we are seeing purchase intent starting to pivot towards more. And is that something more than just I get a better price so I like the bundle? Or is it people are starting to conceptualize connectivity everywhere as a product? Yeah, I think it's both. I think there's a value component to the bundle when you put the two products together. But 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 the Xfinity Mobile, it's one gig download speeds. That's a differentiated product, and we're continuing to try to differentiate the product. So I think it's a combination of both. And we've really rallied the organization around 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 one gig plus speeds, all have a broadband offering. That's more than any of our competitors. And we're pivoting that towards multi-gig symmetrical. So 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. So once again, it creates that great experience, like you said, inside the home, outside of the home. And 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. OpenSignal just came out of the 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 all the features of control and coverage within the home as well. So all that's very important, and that creates a much better mobile. experience. And with the 90% offload, it enables a cost structure where we can provide a great value to our customers. And our pricing on mobile is about half of our competitors, give or take. So that works really well. And then the customer experience is a huge part of this. And we're continuing to invest and focus on the customer experience as well. So overall, we're well positioned when it comes to convergence. And one of the core metrics that we look at is converged ARPA. So 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. So that's another huge opportunity for us as we go forward. And then, you know, then you look to say in early, early innings, but you look at our first quarter results. And, 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, 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. And our mobile attach has accelerated significantly. We had our best quarter ever in the first quarter with 435,000 line that adds. So we have what it takes. It's all about execution, and I own that. So I feel very confident.

And 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. 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, I like model of there's 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 control, and that's what I'm focused on. And to me, that's just about how do you create the best possible experience, bring the greatest value to customers, and hopefully you can knock down those walls as we go forward.

For example, are you seeing 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. It's a combination of fiber. It's a combination of fixed wireless. Satellite is coming into the market, so we look at it all.

Let's talk about your go-to-market strategy in broadband or Wi-Fi. One of the first things you did was simplify broadband pricing. How does the adoption of simplified national pricing for broadband position you in the long run? And is there any risk that that limits your flexibility to compete against regional competitors?

So when you look at it, it was essential. We were way too complex. And that complexity led to a lack of trust, a lack of transparency. So we had to make the pivot. And when you look at how we're structured today, we have our value segment with Internet Essentials. And now we have four speed tiers that range from 300 megs up to 2 gigs. And 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. And that everyday price, we did adjust down. We were out of market, so now we're in market when it comes to that price. And also from a simplicity perspective, we included the gateway in the packaging. So all essential as we move forward. To the second part of your question, then free mobile line as well, for anybody who takes our service, whether you're existing or a new customer. And then to the second part of your question, We've maintained our flexibility, and I would argue that we're actually even more effective. And 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 and as we really dig in that we and we run those models across acquisition upsell retention win back collection so we leverage that across the board so it makes us much more effective in a much more fiscally responsible way and then secondarily is with the structural changes we made we've significantly improved our velocity it used to what used to take us kind of weeks to months to react now it takes us days so that's hugely beneficial as well so we're in a good spot there so you saw a 117,000 subscriber year over

year improvement in broadband net losses about half of that was your legendary February but half of that was sort of sustainable repeatable how much of that is coming from better connectivity that is gross ads, and how much of that is coming from lower voluntary churn? And where does lower voluntary churn stand relative to the historic lows that you've seen?

So 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. So it was very broad. So I haven't really focused on one particular metric. it was it was a broad improvement across the board and as you mentioned you know over 50 percent of that was tied into legendary february it was a fantastic moment for us and we really leaned into that but you know there is an organic component to this as well and i go back to the the new pricing and packaging it was the biggest pivot we've made in the company's history when we did that last year and that is resonating and 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 in our creative and telling our story so that's helped that throughout um just just think about that that the pricing for a second the historically the the super low intro prices are obviously a magnet for accelerating

gross ads the problem is those customers churn off 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 introductory rates would have rolled off. But you're going to pay a price in new customer acquisition initially. Hasn't turned out that way?

The good news is we've moved up market. And the way we've priced it, as you know, is five years a little more expensive than the one year as we look at that. So, you know, we were very pleased with the early results. And to your point, there will be benefits down the road tied to that packaging. And one other area to highlight that, you know, we have spent a lot of time on on top of the new pricing and packaging is we hired a new head of sales across the company. And we've seen an improvement in our sales effectiveness. You know, back to evaluating every part of the business. You know, we need to do a better job from a training perspective of our employees, from a compensation plan perspective, from a tooling perspective. So all of that has played into this as well.

So 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 its first sell is try to get people onto the Converge platform. And going back to leveraging our data, leveraging our marketing tech stack, all of that weighs into that sales effectiveness as well. So we put a lot of time and effort into that.

So, 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. what's priced into your stock price is that you will decline forever and that penetration is going to the 20s. Why is that wrong? Give us a picture of where you think the market ultimately shakes out.

I think first and foremost is we are operating under the condition that fiber will continue to build. Now, how deep they take that will be dependent on their build economics and returns. But fiber will continue to build. Fixed wireless will continue to be aggressive. Obviously, satellite will be in the market in some capacity. So 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. But 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 and satellite will continue to be active so that's a bit of the end state and if you think about the end state you know we've competed with fiber for 20 years so we know they take share early you know over time both share and arpu come to kind of overall market norms so in equilibrium yeah yeah exactly so we know that um from a fixed wireless perspective you know it's it's it's different what i'd say they did really 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 so big focus there and becomes very tactical as well as back to leveraging the data and all those models how do you how do you go after the the value cautious customer leverage our performance win back is a big part of that um and then we look at satellite I think everything that we're doing is going to benefit us against satellite. I'd say in reference to fixed wireless and satellite, our network by far exceeds what they have, and they are capacity constrained. So if you look at that, for me, the more bits, the better. We want usage, and usage is up 10%. 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, it's driven by gaming, you know, new gaming launches, sporting events. It's very choppy, which I think it benefits us as well. So, you know, we have this great, great advantage and opportunity with our network. So, you know, to answer your question in the end state, I mean, we feel good. We've competed with Fiber for a long time, and it's just continuing to differentiate ourselves. Once again, the Wi-Fi experience, the network, all of that makes sure that we're competitive from a pricing and packaging perspective, better customer experience. We know increased MPS scores leads to less churn, and then the mobile component of this all. The convergence and the value proposition tied to mobile is essential as we go forward.

So you've called 2026 an investment year for broadband. Part of that was you didn't take a price increase this year. Is 27 a return to normal, and is 3% to 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?

So as you step back, 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 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. And the big drivers of that were what you touched on. The piece of it was we didn't take the rate increase. Secondarily was the free wireless lines and the way accounting recognition works that impacts broadband ARPU. And then the third is some additional transactional activity from our base as people moved into the new packages so you step back and 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 big part of it is on the mobile free lines so when you when you look at the mobile free lines where early cohorts are starting to happen but we're seeing the significant majority of those customer's role that becomes accretive to broadband as well and even and just having more mobile in general becomes accretive um over time just with as we selling new services etc um so there's a lot there and then you know like i said the mix has shifted as we sold into our new pricing and packaging so we're selling more gig tiers you know over 40 now so that's another benefit as we go forward so you know i think it will continue to move and as i touched on this concept of converged ARPA, one big component of that is broadband and the broadband revenue. But another big component is how do we improve our sell-in to 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.

The point that you made about your ARPA is half of what the mobile-only ARPA is for your competitors, speaks to some of that is the introductory discounts, but most of that is just you've got fewer lines per account. And lower penetration, yeah. Yeah, and so how are you thinking about raising the, not just the attach rate, but also the number of lines per account?

Yeah, so I'd say the one thing that's been great about the the free line offering you know being transparent which would have done it sooner but you know we're in that game now so what it does is allows our customers to test out the product and it drives awareness with the product but like i said once we get the folks in we we spend a lot of our time on life cycle management it's those free lines and like i said the significant in the early cohorts a significant majority of the customers are rolling to paid yeah i was going to say those customers who are rolling to paid are you seeing any particular churn issues with those customers You're not, and we feel, and one of the big components of that is, you think about it, they're rolling from zero, but they're rolling to $30, $40. Which is still less than anything that they can get. Exactly, about half of what else they can get. And you go back into the old days when we had the low broadband offers and we were rolling DDPs that are well above market. We saw that turning, we saw that pain. We're not seeing that as much. But 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. Our premium product is fantastic. And a big, big one is those incremental number of lines. And as I said, to take 30% of our record-setting mobile line that adds are coming from existing mobile customers adding more. So once they get in with the free line, then they say, hey, I'm bringing my next line. Yeah, I was going to say, so is that the dynamic you're seeing?

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 and the rest of the family.

Exactly, VIPs are up.

Yeah, exactly right. The day before you reported results, you introduced new mobile plans, and, for example, they included device insurance, which is an interesting wrinkle. It's a profit center for some that is a profit pool that you can attack. Is that resonating with customers? What kind of response have you seen from customers so far?

So 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. So about a year ago, we introduced our premium unlimited product. And that was, you get the one gig download speeds, but you get 4K streaming, anytime device upgrades, simplified international plans. And we got to about 30% sound, so we're really pleased. It was well above what we had modeled. And then we said, okay, how do we further disrupt that? how we drive more of that premium penetration. There's benefits to that from a churn perspective, from a revenue perspective. And we said, you know what, no one has ever done this. Let's include device protection. And we think a good chunk of our competitors' customers take a device protection plan, probably in the $10 to $20 range. That's incremental value for our customers and another way to position that product. So it just came out, but our expectation is that we improve upon that 30% number.

Can you say what the sell-in rate is for new gross ads to your broadband product? What percentage of them are taking wireless along with the broadband?

Yeah, I've got to look at Marcy on that one. I don't think we've talked about that one yet, so I won't go there specifically yet. You haven't said that. But obviously it's improving.

Yeah, because your overall market share is still in the mid-single digits. And we've looked at the share of gross ads, making assumptions about churn, would say your share of gross ads is in the 20% range. So there's a long runway there. And the question is sort of are you seeing that at the front edge of...

And I would say when we released 16% of our broadband customers have mobile. If you take it down to mobile lines in our footprint, we're probably about 6%, 6.5%. So we have a massive runway. And that's what we're focused on.

So your predecessor, when I would be on the stage with Dave over the last 10 years, it was pretty clear that he viewed broadband more as a defensive strategy to protect, sorry, wireless, 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's our number one priority as we push forward. And it's standalone. It's a firmly profitable product. So we had a couple of options. One is you can maximize the short-term profitability, or we can invest some of the profitability to create the value that we've created, to drive mobile lines, to create a much better mobile converged experience. And with a roughly $200 billion TAM in the mobile space, we've definitely chosen the latter. We're going to make those investments as we move forward.

And 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 CBRX. Can you just talk about those two things and the progress and the vision that you have for those two things?

So we've said about 90% is offloaded onto Wi-Fi. As I mentioned before, we're the nation's largest Wi-Fi network, and it creates a much better experience for our customers back to the one gig of download speed when you attach to our Wi-Fi. And then we do have many markets up with CBRS, and we look at that once again on just a cost of build and does it make sense based on the densities, et cetera, but that's some additional offload that's included in the overall 90% number.

And where does that fit in your priority stack? Because I have a question coming up about your network upgrades, but there are obviously issues of just how much labor you have and what do you tell them to do first. Where does CBRS fit in the priority stack?

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, sell site. But if not, it's all balanced across the broader piece. But I would say the general overall network evolution is prioritized over at Cigar's because our offload is so good on Wi-Fi.

And I realized 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. And it's the component that goes over the cellular network that is the offload.

You're exactly right. That's the way we look at it, kind of the inside and outside of the home. But I think we're – and then in addition on the cost, you get that cost benefit, and then we're selling to our existing broadband customers, so the cost of that is less expensive, and that's what's enabled us to create this great value proposition at about half the rate of our competitors.

Do you have a vision where you have CBRS, ground-mounted small cells sort of ubiquitously across your denser markets so that it really...

Yeah, I don't know that we fully get it. It totally depends on that because 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.

Let's talk about video for a second. Your video subscriber losses have eased, but not... You know, you're still contracting at a 9.5% annual rate. Charter's gotten that down to 1.3% rate of decline, so 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, or 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 and obviously for a segment of the market video is very relevant but we focus more on giving our customers optionality and control so when you look at it you know we've simplified our video packages just as we have with our broadband packages so we have you know some skinnier bundles in our now now construct and then we have four linear packages that now have fees in the primary set-top box included underneath that though we've really leaned into bundling of apps so we we had one we call stream saver app we now have 12 and it includes anywhere between three four and five apps and mixes of those in in those bundles but provides a value to the customer about 25 to 40 percent so once you come back to this optionality and given a customer choice but we also make that available not only to our video customers but to our broadband customers as well so it's another value component with broadband and when you think about wi-fi um you know you're creating a great wi-fi streaming experience 4k etc so so we we we provide that optionality um so i think when you really think about it we always look at profitability by every one of our products and and where we want to invest and what drives the biggest benefit for broadband and for mobile and that's that's how we look i would imagine the churn rate of customers who are in those video packages, their broadband churn rate is meaningfully lower. Is that fair to assume?

So it sort of works the same way as wireless does, that the deeper the relationship, the better the churn rate. Exactly.

And what we have seen is, like you said, we have seen improvement. We had over 100,000 better in the first quarter. I think it was our best first quarter since the first quarter of 19. So 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? And if I think about all the connectivity opportunities that are arising in data centers and what have you, how are you competing in that and even thinking about positioning for edge inference and for AI and that sort of thing?

So, amen. I agree with you 100% that 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 and to your point a bit you know smb we're the you know largest provider of of to smb businesses in the in the country um to your point where a lot of the momentum and growth is coming in is is in the mid-market and enterprise space and what we're really focused on there is selling solutions connectivity is foundational but it's selling solutions and we one of the metrics we look at is for every dollar of connectivity we now sell in 70 cents of solutions if you go back a few years it was one third of that so it's a big area of focus and um that's where we spend a lot of our time innovating you know we've 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 i tell examples of that so we're going to 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 500s communication spend and we do serve most of those customers so we 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 so i think 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 head ends and along the way so 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. So it's an area we're leaning into, similar with data centers and connectivity to the data center. So we're spending a lot of time in that space, but we do think that's going to be a big opportunity for us as we move forward.

You just talked about the opportunity created by the infrastructure and the plant. 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 going to have to eventually upgrade to fiber and HFC is going to come to the end of its life cycle. Why is that wrong?

Yeah, so what I would say is if you really look at our end state, you know, full duplex DOCSIS 4.0, there isn't anything of fiber, you know, fiber comparatively that we can from a network perspective. And 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. And you look at overall total cost of ownership, we're in a really good spot. You start with capital. It costs about $200 a passing, so what, one-seventh or one-tenth of a fiber passing as you get the drop to the side of the home. From an operating expense perspective, maybe $1 to $2 more, but we'll take that tradeoff 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 and core to that intelligence is if you think about it our nodes our amplifiers all the way down to the gateway ai capable chips and the telemetry we can build upon that we fully virtualize the network as well um you know so we're you know we're looking at self-healing that's going on and it's really important for for repair and maintenance absolutely and you look at yeah and you proact you know being proactive with our customers so and we can predict much better than we ever have so 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 because we can get ahead of that and work the plant so there's a lot of power in that and then you know with all that 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. So there's a tremendous amount of value and power in that. So I think, you know, but, you know, we're 60% of the way there as we sit here today, less on the end state.

And that's just with the split strategy but not with DOCSIS 4.0.

And that DOCSIS 4.0 deployments are starting to accelerate. So you have the amplifiers. We're kind of the long pole in the tent. We now have those. So we're out enabling that back to our mid-splits as well as on anything new that we're building. So as we get to scale, then we'll finally be able to market. 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, which will happen as we get through the end of this year.

So 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, where you've been doing edge outs and rural bills.

Most of the plant is fiber as well, which is not the drop.

So 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, and then 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 us, we just haven't marketed the capabilities. And so do the customers know? Obviously, we let them know that, hey, the Midswell here, you've got additional downloads. So there's some slight benefits there, but it's going to be as we get out into market. That's where it's going to really take hold.

The 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, or at least C&P returns to a growing business.

So we've talked about it before. We're in a deliberate investment cycle, right? So 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. So, you know, all of that with time will lap. But if you look at the fundamentals and the foundation is tremendous demand for broadband, right? That usage continues to grow. It's essential in people's lives and, you know, intermingled the terms, but really around that Wi-Fi experience in the home. So that's a big positive for us. And then you look at our converge 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, $10 billion business, great runway for growth. We're proving that we are growing in that space. So that's another significant opportunity for us. Tied in the convergence piece is mobile. continue to penetrate mobile, and as we talked about, you add more lines in, you add more premium services in, so you have a huge benefit coming in from mobile. Another one we haven't talked a lot about, but I've focused on as we came in, is we're doing a better job of leveraging the totality of the company. Matt Strauss, who is the CEO of NBC Media, and I have been working very, very closely together on a project we call 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 going to say, legendary February is an interesting proof point. And just all the impressions we got and how we can leverage data in different ways. So there's value in that. And then from a cost perspective, right, is we're improving the experience and all these things we're doing from a network perspective. That's taking costs out of business. You're going to have that as a tailwind as well. And we're continuing to look at the structure of the company and just continuing to gain efficiencies and building more effectiveness along the way as well. So there's a lot there. We have a great hand, and it goes back to we just need to execute, but I'm confident we'll get there.

Well, it's a good place to end it. I thank you for spending the time with us this morning, and I think all of us wish you great success in your new role and with the turnaround that you're trying to pull off.

Well, thank you. I appreciate you having me here, Craig.