Speaking at the Citi Internet, Media, and Telecommunications Conference in Las Vegas this week, Charter CEO Tom Rutledge was upbeat about how integration of Time Warner Cable and Bright House operations is going since the operator completed transactions to acquire them last year. He also indicated that despite growing pressures from OTT video providers, he doesn’t see the traditional video cable bundle going away any time in the near future. Additionally, Rutledge used the investor meeting to underline some of Charter’s plans for future ultra high-speed and 5G offerings.
“Five years from now video will still be a major, if not the major, component of our business,” Rutledge says. “There are a lot of reasons why the big rich packages will stay together and people will continue to pursue their historical patterns.”
Rutledge did concede that pressures around video obviously exist for Charter including the fact that the total multichannel business is shrinking even as costs rise – mainly due to the high price of programming. “We have a $10 billion programming budget,” he observes. “That’s a lot of money per sub per year.”
When asked about Charter’s strategies for future multi-gigabit offerings, Rutledge noted that one of the reasons he was in Las Vegas this week was to meet up with CableLabs members to further discuss technologies the operator can take advantage of that don’t require putting fiber in all the way to the home. “We believe we can get our coaxial network to get to work at 10 gigs symmetrical,” Rutledge says.
While he didn’t call it out by name, he’s likely referencing the fact that CableLabs DOCSIS 3.1 Full Duplex extension does indeed offer symmetrical 10 Gbps. That spec should be completed this year. (A white paper, “Full Duplex DOCSIS Technology over HFC Networks” by CableLabs’ Belal Hamzeh is available here.)
Add some radios to the end of that network, and you’ve got a lot of wireless capacity, Rutledge noted. “Almost all connectivity is going to be wireless, and we’re now experimenting with 5G frequencies to be essentially what are WiFi products are today, which is not mobility but wireless connectivity … We think we have the best network to build the next generation of wireless services.”
As for the integration of TWC/Bright House and legacy Charter systems, Rutledge underlined that the company is working toward looking like just one operator from a pricing and marketing perspective. One of the current challenges is that the combined company has 10 different billing software platforms and that means 10 different call center environments, Rutledge noted.
“We’re building an infrastructure this year that will get us down to three, and that will allow for a more efficient call center and sales environment − a much more efficient billing system service environment,” he says. “And by the end of ’18, we expect to be at one with a single overarching platform.”
Rutledge also reported that Charter, which currently has around 92,000 people working for it, will probably look to hire another 20,000 in next three or four years to work toward his vision for advanced service capabilities.
