Charter’s Rutledge: We'll gain enterprise share with high-value products, shorter installation intervals

Charter says it has an opportunity to enhance revenue opportunities with small to medium businesses (SMBs) and enterprises via a mix of competitively priced services and shortening installation times. 

As a way to drive up higher enterprise customer growth, Charter’s Enterprise segment launched a new pricing structure.

Thomas Rutledge, CEO and chairman of Charter Communications, told investors during its first quarter call that the cable MSO plans to implement a combination of competitively priced services and a speedier installation process to lure larger business customers.

“We've gone to a lower-priced, higher-volume, higher-quality product mix with a service infrastructure to reduce installation times for all fiber products to businesses,” Rutledge said during the earnings call, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript. “We've developed a construction infrastructure, meaning we have personnel that are able to build fiber infrastructure to new business customers in a rapid way.

Rutledge said that by reducing network installation times, “we think we can start to move some of that share which we have a very miniscule piece of today.”

The cable MSO said it plans to do the same with the SMB segment in the former TWC and Bright House Network territories in the middle of the year.

“We have a similar strategy with SMB, to what we have with residential in many ways, which is to create high-value, high-volume opportunities in the market place,” Rutledge said. “And we price and package our SMB product in such a way that we've accelerated unit growth significantly and the revenue growth and ARPU growth catch up with that.”

Rutledge added that “we expect to have happen just like we do in our residential base.”

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Charter’s total commercial revenue—including small to medium business (SMB) and enterprise combined—grew 10.8% to $1.4 billion.

Taking out wireless backhaul and its NaviSite cloud operations, Charter’s enterprise revenues grew 10% to $539 million. Total commercial revenue, SMB and enterprise combined, grew by 10.8%. 

Overall Charter's total first quarter revenues were $10.2 billion, up 4.3% year-over-year.