At its annual meeting of shareholders, Comcast confirmed plans to offer residential VoIP services across its entire cable system by 2006, pending a successful market acceptance in the three VoIP rollouts it currently has underway -- Philadelphia, Indianapolis and Springfield (MA). The company expects 50% of its cable plant to be VoIP ready by year-end 2004 and to have 95% of its cable plant VoIP ready by year-end 2005.
Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said the company's vision is to provide a fully integrated triple-play service in which telephony is combined with video, messaging and other advanced features.
Comcast currently has about 1.25 million circuit-switched cable telephony customers. Cable phone revenue declined 20.3% from 2003 to $178 million in Q1 2004, reflecting a 12.1% decrease in subscribers and a 9.5% decline in average monthly revenue per subscriber to $47.34. Over the past year, Comcast has been focusing on the profitability of its telephony service rather than trying to scale the circuit-switched deployments.
Some other notes from the annual shareholder meeting:
- Michael Armstrong' stepped down as non- executive chairman of the company. Brian L. Roberts has now become chairman of the board
- Comcast currently has 5.7 million cable modem subscribers, making it the largest U.S. broadband provider. It expects to add 1.5 ~ 1.6 million more high-speed Internet subscribers this year.
- CAPEX for 2004 is expected to be in the $3.3 ~ $3.4 billion range, compared to $4.1 billion last year and $5.2 billion in 2002.
- Comcast expects to add 700,000 to 1 million digital cable subscribers this year. It ended 2003 with 7.6 million digital cable subs.
- All of the company's sponsored proposal were approved at the meeting. All five shareholder sponsored proposals were voted down.
- Cablevision, which provides cable TV service to some 3 million households in the New York metropolitan area, launched a residential VoIP service in September 2003.
- Cox Communications announced plans in April 2004 to launch its Digital Telephone in Northern Virginia beginning next month to compete with the incumbent local carrier, Verizon. Cox will be using circuit-switched technology in Northern Virginia. Cox's Northern Virginia cable system includes franchises in Fairfax County and Fredericksburg. Cox said it is already the third largest local exchange carrier in Virginia, with existing service in two other Cox markets - Hampton Roads and Roanoke. In December 2003, Cox Communications launched its first VoIP-based cable telephony service in Roanoke, Virginia.
