Mobile 'is not a big driver of acquisition or necessarily churn reduction for our business,' WideOpenWest CEO Teresa Elder said. WOW launched a mobile product nearly three years ago.
Mobile has become a critical component of the convergence strategies of Comcast and Charter Communications. However, mobile has yet to deliver much punch to WideOpenWest's (WOW's) business.
WOW added mobile to the bundle nearly three years ago, yet the operator has yet to say how many mobile lines it has added during that time or detail how aggressively it is marketing mobile. For now, there's still not much to talk about of how mobile is helping WOW gain and retain customers.
"We continue to have a mobile offering," WOW CEO Teresa Elder said Tuesday on the company's Q1 2025 earnings call when asked to weigh in on how the company's mobile strategy was going. "I would say it is not a big driver of acquisition or necessarily churn reduction for our business."
She said WOW has instead focused on broadband, considered its "core" product, and its bundling of YouTube TV following an agreement with the virtual multichannel video programming distributor (vMVPD) announced in May 2023.
WOW soft-launched its mobile product in June 2022 and followed with a system-wide deployment a few weeks later. WOW's mobile service runs on the T-Mobile network and is underpinned by a platform from Reach that handles elements such as billing and packaging.
WOW currently offers a mix of three by-the-gig plans and an unlimited plan. Its "Basic" tier starts at $15 per line per month for 1 gigabyte (GB) of sharable data, and its "All-in" unlimited plan starts at $45 per line per month for 20GB. Pricing is reduced as customers add more mobile lines (up to six) across most of WOW's mobile plans. WOW also offers a discount of $10 per line per month when customers bundle mobile with home broadband. WOW Mobile currently does not support eSIMs, but does include HD video , mobile hotspot and unlimited talk and text.
WOW's less-than-stellar performance with mobile so far is in contrast to the success seen by Comcast, Charter Communications and (to a greater degree recently) Altice USA, which reports Q1 results tomorrow morning (May 8). In Q1, Charter added 514,000 Spectrum Mobile lines and Comcast added 323,000 mobile lines, for a combined total of 18.53 million.
Home broadband remains important to both Comcast and Charter, but mobile has begun to take the lead in Comcast's and Charter's service packages. WOW, meanwhile, remains focused on a "broadband-first" strategy.
WOW's seemingly lifeless experience with mobile also arrives as other small and midsized operators get into the mobile game via the National Content & Technology Cooperative's (NCTC's) agreements with Reach and AT&T, or by carving out their own mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) and mobile virtual network enabler (MVNE) agreements. Examples of operators on that list include Mediacom Communications, Schurz Communications, Breezeline, TDS Telecom, TVS Cable and Midco.
Cable One, a midsized operator that uses Reach's platform for its prepaid broadband product, remains unconvinced that adding mobile to the broadband bundle is the right move.
Like many of its peers, WOW is also struggling to return to broadband subscriber growth.
WOW lost 4,500 high-speed Internet subs in Q1 2025, lowering its total to 465,900.
Those losses are weighted toward WOW's legacy footprint. A bright spot is WOW's greenfield builds in parts of Florida, Michigan and South Carolina, along with "edge-outs" where WOW is building to areas adjacent to its existing networks. In Q1, WOW added 2,000 broadband subs in greenfields and 900 in its edge-out expansion markets.
In Q1, WOW passed an additional 13,700 homes with fiber and passed 1,500 new homes in its edge-out areas. At the end of the period, WOW passed 75,600 homes in greenfield markets.
"[W]e think it is clear that underlying losses are likely to continue for the foreseeable future, where greenfield expansion is not making up for the losses given the competitive environment," KeyBanc Capital Markets analyst Brandon Nispel said in a research note. "That said, WOW's greenfield/edge-out programs produced its best results since 2Q24, which is potentially a sign that greenfield/edge-outs are starting to work."
WOW is trying to turn the tide on broadband with simplified pricing plans, including optional price-locks, that do not include data caps or long-term contracts. WOW is also including the modem. That combination is benefiting WOW's overall broadband business, "especially in our expansion markets," Elder said.
Another bright spot was average revenue per unit, which rose 3.7% year-over-year to a record $75.
WOW lost another 11,700 video subscribers in Q1, lowering that total to 48,900, and penetration of just 2.5%. WOW expects to eventually phase-out its own pay-TV service in favor of YouTube TV and other third-party services.
WOW pulled in Q1 revenues of $150 million, down 7.1% versus the year-ago period. High-speed data revenues decreased $800,000 to $105.4 million.
WOW posted a Q1 net loss of $13.9 million and ended the quarter with $28.8 million of cash and debt and finance lease obligations of $1.03 billion.
WOW had no comment on an unsolicited acquisition proposal from DigitalBridge and Crestview Partners.
The operator expects to generate Q2 2025 revenues of $141 million to $144 million and to lose in the range of 4,500 to 6,500 broadband subs during the period.
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