Charter Communications announced plans to accelerate its push into consumer telephony services through a partnership strategy. The cable operator has signed agreements with Level 3 Communications and Sprint Communications to provide long distance and local telephone service connectivity in selected cable markets across the U.S.. In addition, Charter has selected Accenture to provide telephony provisioning services.
Charter said the partnerships would enable it to reduce the cost and time required to deploy telephony services across many markets.
Tom Cullen, Charter Executive Vice President of Advanced Services and Business Development, said “We chose to align with more than one carrier to maximize the benefits of each agreement on a market-by-market basis and achieve the maximum cost savings and flexibility. We’ll continue to look at other potential partners in order to further gain critical competitive advantage.”http://www.charter.com
- Charter currently offers voice telephone service in three markets. Its telephony customers numbered 31,200 telephony customers as of June 30, 2004.
- Charter Communications ended Q2 with 1,711,400 cable modem customers. The company has migrated substantially all of its cable modem customers to a new pricing structure, resulting in average monthly revenue (ARPU) per customer of $35.87, a 4% increase over the first quarter of 2004.
- Charter ended Q2 2004 with 10,526,000 revenue generating units (RGUs), reflecting a net decrease of 2,700 RGUs from Q1 2004. The decrease in RGUs was driven by a net loss of 58,800 analog video customers and 7,200 digital video customers, partially offset by the gain of 58,400 residential HSD and growth in telephone customers during the quarter.