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Jessica Fischer

Thanks, Chris. Please note that today's results include several Los Angeles wildfire effects. As Chris mentioned last quarter, we are committed to these communities and to actively rebuilding them. Our first quarter customer results include approximately 9,000 disconnects related to the fires. We provided credits to impacted customers and also incurred some incremental expenses.
The first quarter adjusted EBITDA was not meaningfully impacted by either. We expect that as we rebuild our plant to approximately 16,000 homes passed in Los Angeles over the coming quarters. We will incur additional CapEx, though not at a level that would require us to change our outlook. Also, please note that this quarter, we made a number of expense reclassifications to reflect changes in how we manage our business in connection with the recent launch of our Spectrum business brand. The reclassifications do not result in any changes to operating expenses or adjusted EBITDA for any period.
We've reclassified prior periods so that appropriate year-over-year growth calculations can be accurately derived. And today's published trending schedule also shows our P&L using both the new and previous expense disclosure methodologies so that you can see the impact of the changes. Let's please turn to our customer results on slide 10.
Including residential and SMB, we lost 60,000 Internet customers in the first quarter. In mobile, we added 514,000 lines. Video customers declined by 181,000 versus a loss of 405,000 in 1Q '24, with the improvement primarily driven by the rebundling we launched in September, along with our Life Unlimited brand refresh. Video performance doesn't yet reflect the benefits of incorporating seamless entertainment apps in our products. Wireline voice customers declined by 278,000.
We were generally pleased with our first quarter customer results. During the quarter, we saw improvements in customer gross additions across Internet, video, and mobile and lower churn in video and mobile with Internet churn stable year over year despite the lack of ACP and well below pre-COVID levels. We continue to compete well across our footprint.
In rural, we ended the quarter with 902,000 subsidized rural passings. We grew those passings by 89,000 in the first quarter and by over 400,000 over the last 12 months. And we generated 39,000 customer net additions in our subsidized rural footprint in the quarter. We continue to expect rural passenger growth of approximately 450,000 in 2025, our biggest year so far, in addition to continued nonrural construction and fill-in activity.
Moving to first quarter revenue on slide 11. Over the last year, residential customers declined by 2.1%, while residential revenue per customer relationship grew by 2.1% year over year, given promotional rate step-ups, rate adjustments and the growth of Spectrum Mobile. Those factors were partly offset by a higher mix of nonvideo customers, growth of lower-priced video packages within our base, and $47 million of costs allocated to programmer streaming apps and netted within video revenue. As slide 11 shows, in total residential revenue declined by 0.1%.
Turning to commercial revenue. Total commercial grew by 1.4% year over year with mid-market and large business revenue, formerly Spectrum Enterprise growth of 3.9%, driven by PSU growth of 5.4%. When excluding all wholesale revenue, mid-market and large business revenue grew by 4.4%. Small business revenue declined by 0.2%, reflecting a decline in small business customers, partly offset by higher revenue per customer. First quarter advertising revenue declined by 12.9%, primarily due to less political revenue.
Excluding political, advertising revenue decreased by 5.1% and due to a more challenged national and local advertising market. Other revenue grew by 13.4%, primarily driven by higher mobile devices. And in total, consolidated first quarter revenue was up 0.4% year over year and 0.8% when excluding advertising revenue.
Moving to operating expenses and adjusted EBITDA on slide 12. In the first quarter, total operating expenses declined by 2.6% year over year. Programming costs declined by 10.4% due to a 7.3% decline in video customers year over year, a higher mix of lighter video packages and $47 million of costs allocated to programmer streaming apps and netted within video revenue, partly offset by higher programming rates.
First quarter 2025 programming costs included $12 million of favorable adjustments versus $28 million of favorable adjustments in the prior year period. Other cost of revenue increased by 8.7%, primarily driven by higher mobile device sales and higher mobile and mobile service direct costs. Cost to service customers, which combines field and technology operations and customer operations declined 2.2% year over year, primarily due to productivity from our 10-year investments, including lower labor costs. Marketing and residential sales expense grew by 7.7% as we remain focused on driving customer acquisition and given our Life Unlimited brand relaunch in September. Finally, other expense declined by 7.8%, mostly driven by onetime benefits of $75 million.
Adjusted EBITDA grew by 4.8% year over year in the quarter and by 3.4% when excluding the onetime benefits in other expense that I mentioned. Turning to net income. We generated $1.2 billion of net income attributable to Charter shareholders in the first quarter compared to $1.1 billion last year. Given this quarter's higher adjusted EBITDA and lower interest expense, partly offset by a noncash impairment, driven by a balance sheet write-down of our LA Laker RSN this quarter.
Turning to slide 13. Capital expenditures totaled $2.4 billion in the first quarter, down about $400 million from last year's first quarter, driven by the timing of CPE spend, upgrade/rebuild related to network evolution and line extension spend.
While we continue to assess the potential impact of new tariffs, we don't currently expect tariffs to have a significant impact on our capital expenditures for this year and over the next several years. We have attractive agreements with our equipment vendors, and we continue to work with them to minimize the impact of tariffs while at the same time, supporting the health of the cable equipment ecosystem. We continue to expect total 2025 capital expenditures to reach approximately $12 billion, and we have not changed our multiyear capital outlook. We also don't anticipate the tariffs to have a meaningful impact on our P&L as the vast majority of our P&L expenses are programming, labor, and service driven and are not subject to the new tariffs.
Turning to free cash flow on slide 14. First quarter free cash totaled $1.6 billion, an increase of approximately $1.2 billion compared to last year's first quarter. The increase was primarily driven by lower capital expenditures, higher EBITDA, and lower cash interest.
Just a brief comment on 2025 cash taxes. We still expect under existing tax legislation that our calendar year 2025 cash tax payments will total between $1.6 billion and $2 billion. However, we expect second quarter cash taxes to total around $1 billion given the two cash tax payments we are always required to make in the second quarter and some other timing items.
We finished the quarter with $93.6 billion in debt principal. Our weighted average cost of debt remains at an attractive 5.2%. Our current run rate annualized cash interest is $4.9 billion. We began repurchasing stock in late February following shareholder approval of the Liberty Broadband transaction. During the quarter, we repurchased 2.1 million Charter shares and Charter Holdings common units, totaling $750 million (sic - see press release, "$751 million") at an average price per share of $365.
As of the end of the first quarter, our ratio of net debt to last 12-month adjusted EBITDA moved down to 4.06 times and stood at 4.16 times pro forma for the pending Liberty Broadband transaction. The decline in leverage in the quarter was driven by our inability to repurchase shares in the open market until we had shareholder approval of the Liberty Broadband transaction in late February. We expect to gradually increase our leverage to the middle of our 4 to 4.5 times range pro forma for the Liberty transaction over the next several quarters.
As we laid out last quarter, our plan is to grow EBITDA in 2025 and with strong contributions from the mobile business as well as continuing efficiency improvements driven by our investments, we made good progress against that plan in the first quarter. As we continue to grow the business financially, we will also see outsized improvements to free cash flow, driven by the end of our major onetime investments in our network evolution and subsidized rural initiatives. That reduction in capital spending from approximately $12 billion in 2025 to less than $8 billion in 2028 is equivalent to over $25 of annual free cash flow per share based on today's share count. Ultimately, the strength of our P&L and decline in capital intensity over the next several years, combined with our appropriate balance sheet management and resulting share buybacks will drive stronger returns for shareholders for many years.
And with that, I'll turn it over to the operator for Q&A.

Question and Answer Session

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Craig Moffett, MoffettNathanson.

Craig Moffett

Two questions, if I could. First, can you just talk about the differences that you're seeing in the converged households where you've got wireless now. And if you could also, by the way, update us on what the attach rate is since we have individual lines, but not penetration of households. But what kind of differences are you seeing in churn rate? Is wireless really benefiting your broadband numbers now that it's reached some level of scale?
And then just quickly, Jessica, perhaps you could just let us know whether you think tariffs will have any impact on capital spending and your ability and cost of securing equipment for capital projects.

Christopher Winfrey

Sure. So let me tackle the first one, and then we can together tackle the second one. The converged household difference. We've talked about it before, Craig. There is a substantial difference in the Internet churn rate for a customer who also takes mobile lines.
To the extent they have more mobile lines, it's even better to the extent it's supported mobile lines, it's even better. And to the extent they have device that they finance through us, it's even better. So incrementally, it goes to that -- those degrees. However, and we are getting a good reasonable penetration on Internet. So what I'm about to say, starts to lose some of its weight.
However, there is a natural tendency for customers who are already going to turn less from Internet to be attracted to taking more of your products. And so there's a self-fulfilling prophecy, and so we try not to get too far over our SKUs and estimating the benefit of that churn reduction to Internet. It is significant. Some of it is based on happy customers to begin with. And -- but when you look through the scale that we have today, it is clear that it's not just a self-fulfilling prophecy that there is dramatic benefits to our customer base of having that.
Part of the reason is it isn't just product convergence that is driving that. It's really value convergence. We're saving these customers hundreds and even thousands of dollars. So there is a technology convergence, which allows you to have a faster mobile product because of the combination with our WiFi and increasing CBRS. And so that creates a product variation that's positive for us.
But there's also, as a newcomer to the mobile space, the ability for us to save these customers hundreds and thousands of dollars. And so that drives penetration drive satisfaction and it drives lower churn for the existing Internet relationship as well. We're seeing an improved ability to use Spectrum Mobile from an acquisition standpoint for years. That's been the goal. And so we're starting to see not only the benefits of using mobile for churn reduction but also for -- also in acquisition. We've often talked about the mobile penetration. I don't have that in front of me.

Jessica Fischer

Yeah, just under 20% of our Internet customers are mobile customers today.

Christopher Winfrey

And then on the tariff question, do you want to start off?

Jessica Fischer

Yeah, I said it in the prepared remarks, Craig, I don't expect tariffs to have a meaningful sort of overall impact on our capital expenditures, and that was part of the reason that I was able to reiterate our guide for the year at $12 billion and our multiyear CapEx outlook, even including what we expect for the impact of tariffs today.

Christopher Winfrey

And look, I agree with all that. If you take a step back, I'd just highlight, Charter is an American company offering services to more than 57 million US families and businesses. And we have 100% US-based workforce. And so naturally, Craig, our preference is to buy American made products when they're available and when they're priced competitively and saying the obvious, I think tariff imbalances are, by definition, unfair.
And clearly, President Trump has taken a strong stand, at least from the outside, it appears to be creating an important opportunity for other countries to lower their tariffs, eliminate trade barriers. And from our perspective, to benefit US workers like ours and our US-based customers. But again, stating the obvious, we hope that can all happen soon, and we're hoping that's the case.

Operator

John Hodulik, UBS.

John Hodulik

Chris, could you update us on the rollout of seamless entertainment? I think we were waiting for some progress on the digital storefront and folding in some new apps. But just any help you can give in terms of the timing. What that product will look like? And it seems as if you guys are expecting some further improvement in some of your underlying KPIs, whether it's video or broadband. So could you flesh that out a little bit? Or is there a way to size the impact that we can expect to see? Thanks.

Christopher Winfrey

Sure. So let's go through the steps that I talked about in the past couple of quarters. The first is to get these direct-to-consumer apps, which are included now as part of our Spectrum TV select services launched in front of customers so that they could actually activate to the extent they were looking for it on spectrum.net or My Spectrum App. And that has now been complete for all but two of the apps, which are remaining, which I believe is Discovery+ and BET+. But the most recent launches were Peacock and AMC+, and I'm sure I'll forget a couple along the way. But now it means, you've got Disney+, you've got ESPN+, you've got ViX, you've got MAX, you've got Peacock, Paramount+, Tennis Channel, all of which either through TV Everywhere or through DTC authentication on those two platforms, spectrum.net or My Spectrum App. You can go authenticate those as a customer, get the ad-supported version of those today.
The second piece that we were looking to implement with the ability for customers to seamlessly upgrade those ad supported -- I think I said ad free, ad-supported DTC ops to upgrade those to add free for the incremental dollars of retail value, and that is taking place. And for the most part, is implemented for those apps that have been launched as well. And all that's available today in a much easier format. It's not always consistent based on the credential requirements and authentication requirements of the program, but at least it's much more user-friendly today than it was just a couple of months ago. And so we're making real progress there.
The digital store that we've talked about, we've been launching a little bit later this year, which enables all of that to be put together in an even more seamless way, but also to sell these direct-to-consumer apps to our broadband customers on the increment as well and manage your subscription in and out, including DTC, direct-to-consumer ad-supported inclusion, upgrade to ad-free, selling these apps to broadband customers and upgrading into packages that will allow you to have more value inside these direct-to-consumer.
So it's all making progress. We are at a stage where we're feeling more comfortable of driving that into the marketplace. And so those of you live in footprint, particularly for investors, New York City and Los Angeles, keep an eye out for advertising that will be highlighting the benefits to customers of our video products of being able to include these services.
And I think the really exciting part is having the support of the programmers to help drive and understand that Spectrum Internet is the best place to be able to get these apps and that these apps are included as part of your service for Spectrum TV Select. Really, we've gotten the programs combined to come behind us. And so you'll see advertising that's really compelling helping support the Spectrum products from Disney, MAX, Paramount+, all that's in market today and it's compelling and it recognizes that the best place for customers to get all these values through Spectrum and the best place for programmers to get the value to them is really to have all these services bundled together to the extent a customer can afford it. And so I'm excited.
The video product because of where we've gotten to it. It's not necessarily cheap because of all the rate increases that the programmers took historically, but now there's real value inside there. When you combine that with the utility of Xumo, it gives you the ability to save significant amounts of money. We now have $80 and more value that comes in from the inclusion of these apps as part of your TV select service. And so we're excited about it.
So to answer your question, we haven't started to aggressively market that yet. We'll start to see some of that coming around I don't think that the improvement in video that you've seen so far is uniquely driven by these apps and inclusions as of yet. So I would hope that it gets better.
The reason our video performance is better is because we've been of the new pricing and packaging that bundles it, allows us to present a lower Internet price, both at promotion and retail when you bundle video. The reason that we're able to do that is because we had more confidence in the value of the video product that we were putting in front of customers, and we felt good about standing behind the products that we offer. And that's a real testament to the programmers who've worked with us over the past 1.5 year to get to that space.
And I think we're on a good trajectory and it's a little unknown. I'd call it option value. The biggest driver here for us is obviously Internet and mobile. But I think our video results can improve. And I think we're offering a compelling product and at a minimum, it's something that we're proud to put on the bill now and use together with broadband.

John Hodulik

Do you think the launch of the service also will benefit the trends on the broadband side along with video?

Christopher Winfrey

I think over time, that is certainly the goal. If for no other reason that by bundling in mobile and video, it allows us to have a lower presented price for Internet, both in promotion and retail and have lower roll-offs in terms of promotional roll-offs, which benefits not only at acquisition, but service transactions over time and churn over time as well.
So it was an elegant way to get us into an environment where we could -- despite having a secure product, present a lower price than our competitors because of the all-in value that we could provide to the household, which is unique. None of our competitors were able to have Internet and mobile everywhere they operate. And none of our competitors are able to actually offer that bundled together with video and save importantly, save customers hundreds of thousands of dollars on mobile. We provide them the video product that can potentially reduce their bill compared to what they're paying through this quilt of direct-to-consumer apps that they're paying for. We're not paying for it through unauthorized credentials.

Operator

Jonathan Chaplin, New Street Research.

Christopher Winfrey

Jonathan, you might be on mute.

Operator

Ben Swinburn, Morgan Stanley.

Ben Swinburne

Can you hear me?

Christopher Winfrey

Yes.

Ben Swinburne

Great. Chris, I'm sure you're aware, there's a lot of folks right now and certainly in the investment community and the industry on kind of promotions and promotional roll off. This is not new, but something that Charter has been doing for a long time. We can sort of see in your results now, I think the success you're having in kind of rolling off some of the Spectrum One promotions and driving faster revenue growth in mobile and broadband. I'm just wondering if you could talk about why it's working well for you in this environment?
And maybe more importantly, why you think you can continue to execute that approach with your new Life Unlimited plans in a market that seems to be increasingly focused on kind of price locks and all-in pricing. And I guess, your confidence that it's the right strategy because the revenues are there. As you can tell from the questions, people are still looking for broadband to get better on the KPI front. But I'd love to just get your thoughts given where we are in the market around from a roll-off pricing and packaging in the competitive environment.
And I just wanted to ask, Jessica, anything you want to give us in terms of OpEx outlook for the year that's different from the end of the fourth quarter call, speaking maybe cost to service and other expenses going to be trending nicely for you year on year? Just any update, if you have any, would be helpful. Thanks so much.

Christopher Winfrey

So on the promotions and roll-offs, that's a very deep and extensive topic. So I'll do my best to cover a bit of it. I think first and foremost, you have to have the very best product in terms of speed and reliability. The second is that you have to create value for customers and save them money, whether that's a promotion or at retail. And the third is, yes, we do reuse promotional pricing to drive acquisition.
But even when you're at retail, it needs to stick and you need to minimize the promotional roll-offs that you have because it drives service transactions, customer dissatisfaction can result in churn, particularly if that retail price doesn't deliver the value relative to your competition. So while -- at Charter, we had, we believe, the lowest prices across cable. When you get into a retail rate pricing, we're looking for a way that said, is there an elegant way to migrate to lower pricing at retail for Internet, included here -- primarily bundled, but also including for single-play products. In a way that was not tearing apart the existing base of revenue that we have. And the way to do that is to use the products that we have that are competitive advantage, which is mobile and now given the work that we've done as video to say when you bundle together.
You can have at a promotional rate $40 gig, which will have, first and foremost, to your question, price lock two years if you bundle with two types of products and three-year price lock, if you bundle with three products. And even when you're out of that, you have two years of promotional roll-off, so five years down the road, you're at a price point that is still very competitive in the marketplace and offers a better product and more value whether it's bundled or not. And that's where we put ourselves in a position to do so in a way that was still -- that works well for customers. It works well for our shareholders as well. So that's without spending 30 minutes on it.
That's the essence of our strategy and to put more products and value. And so when you think about driving in with gig as opposed to just our 500 megabit per second using the strengths that we have, putting in the unlimited plus version of the product when you bundle together with gig, putting in the cloud DVR is included as part of the service as long as the Xumo Box as well as Xumo Box when you're bundling in that triple play. So it's more than just the amount of PSUs. It's the depth and the quality of the product that we're willing to add in and contribute into that bundle as you move upstream, and it drives quality into the customer base and protects them from churn as these small step-ups occur and most importantly, when you get to retail pricing, because it's a product set and pricing and packaging that cannot be replicated in the marketplace because of how we approach the market. And then if you can combine that with high-quality service, the goal is to have this customer for life.
And I think we had always done a pretty good job of all those things I said. But we had an opportunity to do even better, and that's what the pricing and packaging that we launched in September, enabled us to do. I think it's early days. And I think the real value of what we've done last September, you won't see until you start to get into year -- beyond year one as you have roll-offs that are less or in fact, bundled price locks that are taking place many have even lower amounts of calls, lower amounts of churn. And then for many years to come, you'll have a compounding effect of those lower service transactions and lower churn because there's more value inside that bundle and there's more customers who are bundled.
Does that make sense?

Ben Swinburne

Yeah.

Jessica Fischer

On the operating expenses side, Ben, we had a little more volatility in the quarter and the growth rate for marketing and residential sales, but I still anticipate over the course of the year that, that line will grow in the low to mid-single digits. And in the same place that we were before on programming, cost per video customer and cost to service customer. We are cost to service customers where I would expect it to be flat to slightly down for the year.
In other expense, I think we hadn't given a suggestion there. I think absent the onetime item in this quarter. And I would just note that other expense is a space where we sometimes do encounter onetime items over the course of the year. Absent those, I would have expected also a low to mid-single-digit growth rate in other expense, but I'll call out that it's subject to those onetime items.

Operator

Jonathan Chaplin, New Street Research.

Jonathan Chaplin

Sorry, can you hear me now?

Operator

Yes, we can.

Jonathan Chaplin

Sorry about that. Chris, I'd love to just delve a little bit more into the Life Unlimited pivot that you guys made back in September. I think this is sort of a really important moment for the company. And when we look at our Recon analytics data on NPS, it looks like there's a steady improvement since September. And I'd love to get a perspective of how that sort of matches your internal tracking.
And then I know that you said in response to the earlier question, the real benefits we'll see over time, but I'm wondering what sort of you're seeing in early life churn on the customers that are on the Life Unlimited package relative to what you've seen before and sort of signals that give you confidence in that future improvement?

Craig Moffett

Yeah. So what you would just ask there is what I would call young -- early 10-year customer retention rate is better post the launch of the bundled pricing and packaging in September, which is what you would expect. And so that answers the question there. I think the -- I think as I was talking through, Ben, the real benefit of this won't be fully recognized until we get beyond year one and into year two and into year three. And I think even going into year four and five, you'll see the benefit of that.
We are looking at ways when customers call in under what I would call legacy pricing and packaging, ways to migrate them into this new Spectrum pricing and packaging in a way that delivers a much higher level of value at the same or slightly higher price point but giving them a tremendously higher non-product in doing so because we can. And because it preserves margin for us and puts that customer in a much better relationship. And so maybe there's a chance that even prior to the September one year expiration that we can start to actively migrate customers into Spectrum pricing and packaging that was launched at the same time as the Life Unlimited branding. And that may give us an opportunity to do more with that legacy customer or existing customer base earlier.
As it relates to NPS, there are so many different factors going in. You can have great improving NPS and then you can have a small rate increase that puts a ding into that. But I do agree, generally, we see the same overall trend that Net Promoter Score is increasing. That's a function of the pricing and packaging. That's the function of the quality and the reliability of the product.
It's also a function of changes we've made with our customer commitment. And some of the softer things that we've done inside of the call centers to make sure our customers know that the employee that they're speaking to generally is an employee based here in the US and that we appreciate the time the customers had with us and really their commitment to us as a Spectrum. And so we've made a lot of changes in that environment too and standing behind the product with credits, providing that transparency and proactively providing credits when we do miss the mark. I think goes a long way.
All those things put together is how you get Net Promoter Score to go up. So value, reliability, great service, recognition, US-based employee that we have 100% for sales and service infrastructure, which I don't think we touted enough. And I think all that is working to your point. And -- but I think it's very early days. And I think you'll see bumps along the road, but the overall trend should be going up into the right.

Jonathan Chaplin

And Chris, if there's no change in market growth or the competitive environment from what we're seeing right now, the improvements that you expect in year two, three, four, et cetera, do you think those are enough to get you back to positive broadband subscriber growth?

Christopher Winfrey

I do.

Operator

Jim Schneider, Goldman Sachs.

Jim Schneider

I was wondering if you can maybe give us a bit of an update on what you see in terms of the broader consumer behavior in your base. One of your peers sort of called out higher mobile substitution in some of their cohorts. I'm wondering if you're seeing any of those effects. But then more broadly, maybe talk about any consumer trade-down effects pressuring credit metrics, although they didn't seem to show up this quarter in any way. Just kind of wondering what you're hearing anecdotally from the consumer side based on all the sort of macro uncertainty we have right now. Thank you.

Christopher Winfrey

Sure. Look, I don't think what we're seeing is that different, and I'll come to that. But I just want to be clear, our sales are up and our churn is relatively stable despite the higher nonpay disconnect that Jessica mentioned. So we feel good about our own trends. The factors that are going into broadband industry growth right now, we got the end of ACP, it's largely behind us. I assume that's the same for the industry as a whole.
As you mentioned, mobile substitution, including some low-end cellphone Internet migration is almost back to where it was pre-pandemic. So it's continuing. But my hope is that slows and gets back to where it was, and that's our expectation. So both of those, I think, are going in our direction in terms of industry growth. But one of the big bogeys here is we'll have to see where the housing market goes. And that's always been a contributor to broadband industry growth. That hasn't changed.
So the first two I mentioned, end of ACP, mobile substitution reversion, I think, are going in our direction. The housing climate is a little bit unknown right now, and that will have an impact. But even that tends to be temporary in nature. And then the other thing that you asked about is essentially, I think the market climate really is a recession question. We have not seen anything significant with the consumer so far and neither in non-pay disconnect rates, they're up slightly only because of the lack of ACP.
And I would say in a market environment where customers are rightfully tightening their wallet, our strategy, if you go back and think about what I just said with Ben and Jonathan, our strategy of having the very best products and service at attractive prices and focusing on saving customers' money. If you look at that slide that's in the presentation that we have today, it's huge money. And so in a recessionary in any environment, but particularly in a recessionary environment, I think our products, and our pricing works very well across all environments.
And I think even in a recession, we can present value to customers and stickiness through having the best products at the best prices advertising and telling customers you can save them hundreds or even thousands of dollars on converged broadband and mobile services is a great way. And if you can put together the video package, whether it's through skinny bundles or through really full, when I say full, meaning include linear live video plus all of the direct-to-consumer app bundles in a way that creates value and saves money in a recessionary environment, I think you're in a good position.
And I would just add one final thing to that. We do have -- we're proud of that, a variety of packages that meet the needs of low-income or income-constrained consumers, we always have, and we target that market to make sure that we're servicing all areas of our communities. So I don't have a crystal ball on the economy. But I think we're pretty well positioned for potential headwinds in a recessionary environment, if that's what's coming. I'm not -- like I said, I don't have a crystal ball, and I'm not predicting that.
I'm just saying that we're in a pretty good spot.

Stefan Anninger

Operator, we'll take our final question, please.

Operator

Bryan Kraft, Deutsche Bank.

Bryan Kraft

Can you hear me okay? I just have a question on fiber competition. Would you be able to give us a sense for the difference in your broadband penetration levels in markets where you've competed with fiber for a long time relative to the non-fiber markets? Are you splitting the market 50/50 in those areas after you kind of take out the portion captured by fixed wireless at this point? And also specifically in the older markets, has it been stable as of late? Or is competitive fiber still gaining share in those areas? Just trying to get some more color there, if you wouldn't mind sharing that. Thank you.

Christopher Winfrey

Sure. The -- it's been a while, but we've provided color on this in the past. When we have new fiber overbuilders inside of our markets, we have a few penetration points of rollback. That's been the case. It's still the case. And so it's just a question of mix and newness of fiber rollout. And the pace of fiber rollout has been about the same.
So when you think about all of the market dynamics that are impacting our Internet growth rate. It isn't -- because that fiber overbuild has been there for more than a decade, the impact of fiber has been consistent and steady. And it's really more about the mobile substitution and the introduction of a new low-end competitor with cellphone Internet. Those have been the two big drivers and just market size because of all the things that we've been talking about through this call.
So the other thing I would tell you about fiber penetration is at least inside of our footprint, which goes to your question of 50/50 split. That's not what we see. It's never been what we see. It's not what we see today. And so when you hear other companies talk about the type of penetrations that they are getting, all I can say is they must be having outsized penetration in non-charter markets because we don't see a 50/50 split ourselves continuing even after a 10-year rollout of the fiber overbuild of having higher penetration than 50/50 of the broadband penetration inside those markets.

Stefan Anninger

Thanks, Bryan. That concludes our call. Thanks, everyone. Leila. I'll pass it back to you.

Christopher Winfrey

Thank you all.

Operator

Thank you for joining the call today. We have now concluded, and you may disconnect.