Unknown Executive

All right. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for today's 7th Annual MoffettNathanson Media and Communications Summit. I am delighted to welcome Tom Rutledge, Tom, for your seventh consecutive summit. First virtual, hopefully last virtual. But Tom, at least, it's a pleasure to have you here.

Thomas Rutledge

My pleasure.

Unknown Analyst

I want to start with your quarterly earnings a couple of weeks ago because they were remarkably strong across the board with 4.6% revenue growth, 8.4% EBITDA growth and particular strength in broadband net additions. What I think was most striking about your results is that after the crisis hit in mid-March, your company sort of kicked into a higher gear. Can you just update us? Were you surprised by how strong those results turned out to be? And have they continued to be that strong since then?

Thomas Rutledge

Right. Well, obviously, the first quarter was quite good, and we expected it to be quite good. And the -- as we had forecast previously, we had gone through a big integration. We had finally gotten the companies operating together as a single unit. And we expected accelerating growth, and we've been having accelerating growth for quite some time. So we had high expectations for our first quarter and all the quarters thereafter before we knew where we'd be. And so most of the first quarter was as expected. It was actually a little lighter than we expected in the sense that the COVID problem impacted things like advertising revenue particularly, and it had some impact on SMB in the quarter as well and just at the very end of the quarter. And they were material enough to impact what we thought we would do, but we still had a very good quarter because we were on a very good track.

What has gone on and what we expressed in the call is that we've had the ability to execute. As an essential business, we're set up to execute. And we were fortuitous in the sense that we had already gone to a self-service model and have been implementing that in a logical and orderly way throughout the quarter -- actually prior to the quarter. At the beginning of the quarter, we were in the 50 -- over 50% of installations being self-installation, and we were rapidly moving up the curve and came out of the quarter at approximately 70% of self-installation. And now we're well over 90% self-installation. So as a result of that, we were able to connect a lot of customers very rapidly and very efficiently in a way that they were very comfortable with. And so yes, we've had significant broadband growth since then, and we've made offers to the community as a result of our desire to be a good citizen and help where we can with collections and with free installations and free service to people who need to learn at home learning. And so all of that capability and our marketing efforts associated with the crisis had resulted in a lot of activity, good growth activity, in the residential piece.

Unknown Analyst

And has that continued? It's -- there's one argument that says that it was customers positioning for work-at-home and distance learning. But have you seen follow-through even as the lockdowns have sort of dragged on a bit?

Thomas Rutledge

Yes. Yes, we have, and we've continued to have outsized broadband growth in residential continuously up through today. And interestingly, it's -- we still had growth in the small business area. It's not what we expected or what we planned, but -- and we've had to deal with business customers by suspending some accounts, and we've had lower growth. And some accounts have actually terminated. But very few have terminated. And so we're really in a kind of a holding pattern in small business. Obviously, how long this goes on will have an impact on the carnage that, that holding pattern has. But it is -- there is still growth, interestingly enough, growth in sales in SMB and certain kinds of enterprise services. But in general, the business market is much slower than it was for good reason. In enterprise, we have access to property issues. And people's decision-making is extenuating as well. So all of that has slowed down activity in those areas, but not residential.

Unknown Analyst

So Tom, you -- a couple of weeks ago, you said that you've seen 119,000 new accounts sign up for the free 360-day service that you just mentioned a couple of minutes ago.

Thomas Rutledge

Yes.

Unknown Analyst

Where are those customers coming from that they didn't have broadband before or at least not broadband with you? Are those coming from legacy DSL? Are they coming from cellular only? Or is there any way to tell?

Thomas Rutledge

Well, there's no way to tell for sure. But the profile of the customer base that's taking that offer is not that dissimilar from the general profile demographically, psychographically from -- and creditworthiness from our general population that we -- it's slightly different but not materially different. And so it's -- it looks very much like what's been going on. But my sense is that it's -- if you look at the satellite numbers and you look at -- a lot of those satellite customers are DSL customers as well or other broadband customers. So as they've been migrating to us for broadband and video, I think a significant portion of that is satellite shift, and they bring that with -- they bring their broadband with them.

Unknown Analyst

So -- and that's -- so that broadband may have been then DSL, for example, which is typically paired with satellite?

Thomas Rutledge

That's right. And so interestingly, we've had a lot of broadband growth, but we've actually had a little bit of video growth as well.

Unknown Analyst

Yes. I'll get to the video in a second. I just -- what -- well, you were talking about the type of traffic that you've seen. So your network has held up pretty well, but there are types of usage patterns, different times of day and that sort of thing. Can you just talk about whether the usage on the network has changed any of your either short-term or long-term plans, for example, if you had to do more node-splitting to meet congestion levels in certain neighborhoods? Have you changed the way you think about the time line to move to DOCSIS 4.0 or other network upgrades?

Thomas Rutledge

Right. Well, if we just go back in time a little bit, over the last 2 years prior to 2020, we upgraded the whole, entire network to the DOCSIS 3.1 platform, which gave us 1-gig capability everywhere we operate. And as a result of that, we actually got more throughput through the network.

So with our normal augmentation process, which is our normal, consistent upgrading of the plant to handle anticipated traffic utilization based on the trend lines that we're seeing, we're doing that pretty much a year in advance of the actual growth. And so the 3.1 upgrade actually put us in a position where we had a number of years' worth of growth market in front of us in terms of our need to do capital investment.

And -- or said another way, our capital investment that we made in 2017 or 2018 and 2019 made the plant more capable than it needed to be in 2020. And then we had this massive increase in utilization, but we sized the network to operate and -- at maximum peak utilization, and we pick a target that's well below what we think actual maximum peak utilization will be. And then we augment the network through time based on that projection and with that headway. So we have a lot of leeway in the asset in terms of its capability. And so we've been able to operate pretty much seamlessly with all the demand on it.

Now the demand is spread out. So while demand may be up 40%, 50% in some cases in total throughput, it's spread out so the maximum peak utilization isn't nearly as high of a change in percentage terms.

So the network is quite capable. It was provisioned quite liberally in terms of its overhead. And so I don't think we need to do anything on an emergency basis today, and we're operating well into this change in behavior successfully.

Now what does that do for the future? 4.0 is what you mentioned, which is the next set of specifications that we've developed to take capacity way beyond today's capacity. And we call that 10G in some descriptions. We call it DOCSIS 4.0 because we're such good marketers of new technology. We have to name everything twice badly. But those aren't go-to-market terminologies, and -- but what they mean is we can continue to upgrade the network for future anticipated use fairly efficiently and ahead of when that use is expected.

And the specifications, which go across the industry, allow us to upgrade the whole infrastructure of the country as an industry in a fairly quick and ubiquitous way so that new product sets can operate pretty much everywhere simultaneously, which is a great opportunity if you're wanting to sell services beyond Zoom. So what might those be and how fast might they come along and would that push our capital spending, and the answer to that is I'm not sure.

And I don't know that the virus has changed the arc or the trajectory of the growth of Internet usage, but you could argue it has and that those things could accelerate. And I think we're in a very good position with our specifications to accelerate if we need to. On the other hand, our competitors may be less capable and -- which will take -- will slow down the -- it all depends on how the overall macro market unfolds, but I think we're in a good position strategically to take advantage of something that we've been taking advantage of for a long time, which is that we have a very competitive way of upgrading our network at costs that are well below what alternative technologies can do. And therefore, I think we have a great shot at being the platform of choice for the long term.

And we have -- at our last senior management meeting that we had where we're showing off some of the future technologies that we might use on our network, we did a light field display or a hologram on a desk. And so you can envision new products coming along down the road, which will allow things like telemedicine and education and entertainment to be projected in different ways. And how fast that unfolds, I don't know, but I think we have an opportunity to make the network capable of doing that quickly and efficiently should the opportunity arise.

Unknown Analyst

Well, so Tom, let's think about the way you monetize some of those things. Historically, you more than your peers have prioritized unit growth over pricing growth in broadband. Is that -- your peers that have been more aggressive in growing ARPU -- leaving aside all of the allocations that happen within the bundle and kind of noise there, but your peers that have been more aggressive in pushing ARPU haven't really seen that have a negative impact on their growth rates. How do you think about the balance between price and volume going forward?

Thomas Rutledge

Well, I think about maximizing return on investment. So everybody wants to have the price that's best, you would think, which is maximum output, meaning growth and price, but it's also growth against the asset itself. And if you look at Charter, we now are the most penetrated cable operator in the country in customer relationships and in broadband. And so we've been growing rapidly. And as we grow, we think most of our revenue growth, which is good, and our EBITDA growth, which is better and the best in the industry, is a function of our ability to grow customer relationships efficiently and quickly. So we think we're priced right to grow, and we've demonstrated that we can grow more quickly than anyone at those price levels. And as you grow and increase your penetration against a fixed asset, your cost to serve come down naturally. And particularly, your capital costs and your operating costs come down.

And so if you look at what's happening to our free cash flow growth as a result of our strategy, we had a -- in our fourth quarter earnings, we had a 100% year-over-year increase in free cash flow. The reason is, is because capital intensity is coming out of the business. And as we penetrate further, we have less activity, and we have less maintenance per customer, and we have a happier customer base based on our price-value relationship with the consumer, which means that we have average lives that are longer per customer, which means that we have a happier, less costly customer base with a lower churn rate, which means that marketing dollars per sale -- if your sales costs are the same, you need less sales to have the same amount of revenue growth than someone else who's got a different model. So we think we've -- to the best of our ability -- and there's no perfect knowledge of this until it's over, but we've tried to price our business to maximize the total value output of the asset.

Unknown Analyst

Do you need to do any -- you talked about sustaining volumes. I mean one of the sources of the volumes that kind of my team has written a lot about over the last couple of years has been new household formation. And as you would typically expect new household formation to pull back pretty significantly in a recession, is there anything that you need to do to sort of backfill for that? A, for example, do you think differently about edge-outs or even participating in stimulus dollars under an RDOF plan in order to grow the footprint a little bit to make up for the fact that new household formation isn't going to be growing?

Thomas Rutledge

Yes. Well, that's a good question. When it comes to household formation, the way I think about it is every line extension and every new customer is another investment. And through time, you pile up a lot of incremental investments, and the return of those investments begin to pay off through the cash flow of the operating entity.

And so to the extent that you don't have housing construction for some period of time, you'll have a smaller investment footprint during that same period of time because you won't be building new households and you won't be building new construction. You won't be spending capital for new construction during that time frame. And at some point down the road when they turn cash flow positive, you won't have that cash flow in your future cash flows until some later date when construction starts again. So it's really, to me, just a movement in time of an investment if you think about the long term of the business.

And so when you have housing -- cyclicality in housing, you have a sort of an up and down flow of capital investment and returns to that investment through time. And so in the short run, your free cash flow might go up if housing starts slow down.

That said, there is an opportunity, with the kind of penetrations we're achieving, to build lower-density passings, homes passed that in the past we wouldn't have built. So there is new construction opportunity as broadband adoption has gotten higher. And as our opportunity to get that penetration goes up, it makes the return on investment to line extensions go up, all other things being equal. And so we think there's an opportunity for us to begin building lower-density passings than we've historically built and still make a return on investment. And so we've been doing analysis of places where we could start to build where in the past, we've rejected those projects because they had 0 return. If you forecast a much higher penetration, they prove out. So those 2 things are in contradiction in terms of future capital needs. Both -- if it's a light recession, both could happen.

Unknown Analyst

Interesting. Can you talk about some of the competitive threats you see in the broadband business, whether it's T-Mobile's promise to roll out 5G fixed wireless broadband, Verizon's fixed wireless broadband initiative or even some of the other players like Starry and Vivint and that sort of thing? Do any of those to you look like they're scalable competitive threats?

Thomas Rutledge

Well, yes. I mean everybody is a scalable competitive threat. If they spend money and had enough densification, any wireless network looks like our wireless network, which is a very dense, small-cell wireless WiFi network essentially.

We've been doing also some wireless -- fixed wireless broadband using CBRS spectrum. We did an experiment in North Carolina. We're doing another one in Ohio shortly. It may already be ready to start. I know the construction has been authorized by me. And so it'll -- we've proven out that you can do some wireless rural broadband reach.

I also think, interestingly, some of these -- you can start to think about extensions of -- sort of WiFi extensions around the property or the farm as a fixed business or a pneumatic fixed business. So think of the 10-acre property or a factory or -- you could use a combination of CBRS and WiFi to build products on a fixed wireless -- fixed wireline network like ours with small cells attached to it. It isn't really part of the mobile network in the sense that you're really selling on-property wireless connectivity, which includes the extended property and household areas of an entire business or an entire farm or a large yard or small yard in terms of how you might want to build connectivity. So the notion of what wireless and fixed wireless and wireline are sort of converging even conceptually, and you can use the same spectrum for various approaches to the marketplace.

Unknown Analyst

Right.

Thomas Rutledge

In the end, the size of the cell matters.

Unknown Analyst

That's interesting. I'll come back to wireless in a second. And again, I think it is interesting to think about some of those private network types of applications or sort of WiFi substitution for WAN or LAN applications.

But I want to go back to something you said early on when you talked about the business services market has been growing. That's been one of the places where people's expectation is -- whether it's through bankruptcies of small and medium businesses or just the lack of new business formation, that's been one of your growth engines. How do you forecast internally in this kind of a market for the small and medium business segment? In particular around bad debt, how do you think about the ability to pay and what investors, therefore, can expect for the back part of this year?

Thomas Rutledge

Well, obviously, there's a range of possibilities, and we don't know what they are, I mean, which one is accurate. And so we've sort of pressure-tested our whole enterprise based on what the risk of a prolonged recession might be versus a short term. But it is interesting how many -- how diverse our small business universe is. When we looked at -- and we did, we looked at the 2 million subscribers that we have in SMB, who are they. And they were a lot more diverse than I sort of envisioned them. About 20% of them were in what you might -- in restaurants, bars and hotels and that kind of thing. And the rest were other kinds of businesses, including all the trades that people do, which are operating. And even a lot of the restaurants are operating as takeout places, and even to the extent that they've suspended, they plan on coming back. But a lot of businesses still have websites up and are not -- they're not planning on leaving the marketplace. And so it's actually responded a little better than I thought it would given what is going on objectively around us today.

What that looks like 6 months from now, it's hard to stay because I don't know how successful the rebound will be and how long inefficient social distancing will affect the business universe, and -- but if you just take whether businesses are doing well or not doing well, I still think they'll want to have a connection to us to the extent that they exist as businesses. And we have a range of product sets that we can provide that I think we can satisfy the customer base. It may affect our long-term revenue in an ARPU way, but I also think that we're underpenetrated in the SMB universe, and we have upside if we have good, high-capacity products that are well priced.

Back to your price question. Can we grow market share in SMB? I think we can. And so -- well, I think there'll be dislocation in the near term, and there'll be collection issues in the near term of businesses that are still on and are -- or are in our current revenues which will not be able to pay us. But over a longer term, even in a down market, I think we can make good products that drive our penetration up.

Unknown Analyst

Does the crisis change the pace at which you're trying to reprice the old -- the remainder of the Time Warner customer base? That's been a long-term project that I guess you're probably, what, in the sixth inning now or the seventh inning of that process.

Thomas Rutledge

Yes. It's a lot slower than residential. And the reason it's slower is it churns a lot less and -- which is a good thing. And so it's -- and we've only been doing it through the churn process, not through any sort of forced price migration. And so it's -- now you could argue churn will increase, but, on the other hand, there'll be price pressures. The more churn increases in SMB, it means the rougher the market is out there, and so there's more price pressure. So I don't see that materially change. I mean I don't see our strategy changing there in terms of how we want to price that and the rate at which we'll let it happen. We're going to let it happen organically.

Unknown Analyst

All right. Tom, so let's switch to video for a second. And one of the surprises in your quarterly earnings was how well you did in video not just on absolute terms, losing fewer subscribers this year than last year, but certainly relative to your peers that all saw a much -- a pretty significant acceleration in the rate of decline. What was different about your approach or what you saw versus what pretty much everyone else saw in the quarter?

Thomas Rutledge

Right. Well, I think it's a -- for -- the simple answer is I don't really know, but I'll give you a complicated answer, which is, I think we had some broadband pull-through. As I said earlier, we've been growing broadband rapidly, and we've been converting satellite customers along with that broadband, so that's pulling video through.

We also -- there's 2 other things we've done that I think have an impact. One is we had created some skinny packaging, a non-sports-based packaging, and we have difficulties doing that in a significant way because our contracts for video require us to sell a minimum threshold of sports-driven programming before we can sell other tiers. And it's the nature of that contract base that we have limitations on how much creativity we can exhibit in our marketing and product sets with regard to video. But we have created Latino plans. We've created pick 10 plans, pick 10 program. We've created other services, including a product we call essentials, that allow customers to have a much lower price without sports programming essentially in it.

We've also gone to an app-based distribution model. So we have 8 million customers now who are connected to us through apps as opposed to set-up boxes, and what that does is it reduces our capital intensity, reduces our revenue for equipment, but it also allows us to have a better user experience, and it allows us to be on more devices, a consumer can save money. And so -- and our device -- or our application is the #1 rated app in the country for its category in terms of how consumers perceive that app. So all those things have affected our video.

But none of that -- all of those things combined, while they may have us on a slightly different art than the rest of the industry, doesn't change, I think, your argument about the total secular trend, and we just have some tools that make it a little better for us. And ultimately, being an app-based provider, I think, will allow us to be, over the longer term, a better marketer of new video.

Unknown Analyst

So Tom, as you see this set of trends where as you say it's -- and you can quibble about the rate of acceleration maybe, but there's no question about the direction. How does that change the way you think about negotiations with your content partners? And maybe you can separate the world into sports and non-sports.

Thomas Rutledge

Right. Well, our leverage in non-sports -- against non-sports-content companies has changed. But the -- we haven't done what Charlie Ergen has done, which is to actually put real significant sports holes in the bundled sports product. And, I mean, you can see what that does in terms of accelerating the trend. So we have leverage in a sense that there's not that much margin in the video business, and so letting our customers have higher and higher rates is a problem. But on the other hand, the sports package is still pretty much intact as a product. And we haven't chosen to try to destroy it or do anything but continue to sell it, but continuing to sell it means that it's continuously increasing in cost. And therefore, customers have higher and higher bundled cable bills.

Now some of the downside of selling that product is that people's ire about their bill is projected on to us as opposed to the content companies, and so there's some negativity associated with being a purveyor of high-cost content. But it's still -- people still want to watch it in big numbers, and it's just becoming more of an exclusive product slowly because of its high cost.

Unknown Analyst

What should we expect from advertising for the rest of this year just based on what you're seeing now and the developments just in the last couple of weeks that you've seen in advertising? This was going to be a year with a big political uplift that was going to be a big growth driver. I think it's fair to say that's not going to happen. But how bad do you think it gets?

Thomas Rutledge

Well, I don't know because that's a -- we're starting to open up our own business around the country as these various lockdown orders come off and our sales forces are back out in places where they are allowed to be back out. And so I don't really have a good feel yet for how quickly businesses are going to want to start marketing themselves. But my guess is that if you're committed to your business and you're open, you're going to tell people, and you're going to start spending money again. So I expect it to slowly reconstitute itself.

And how big the political campaign will be -- I still expect it to be a big year from a political point of view. So you're going to have, I think, a normal or an expected high-producing political environment from an advertising point of view.

And how fast the economy rebounds is really a local question. And we're primarily a local business when it comes to ad sales. We have local ad sales markets throughout the country. So in places like Montana, where everything is open, our ad sales forces can work. And they're gradually opening up in Texas and in various other states on a daily basis now. So how quickly localism will come back and people will want to start marketing their businesses is -- your guess is as good as mine, but I think it's on the upswing.

Unknown Analyst

Good. Tom, let's turn to wireless for a second. That's been an obvious potential growth and real growth area for you. You've been, I think, the leader in articulating a strategy for the industry that's just sort of hybrid MNO, or a network operator, MVNO strategy. Can you describe that strategy and what the benefits of that strategy are? What's appealing about that to you?

Thomas Rutledge

Yes. It's -- it goes back to something I said earlier about how you can use various pieces of Spectrum on your small-cell wireline network, which is what our WiFi network is today. So just starting with the basic situation.

80% of all bits that are seen on mobile devices are actually traveling over the WiFi network that's connected to our network. And so when -- and our mobile customers go into their homes, they connect to our WiFi and use the WiFi network as their connectivity, not the mobile network. And actually, the -- it frees burden on the mobile network and it puts burden on our network, but our network is quite capable. And our average customer, who doesn't subscribe to our QAM-based video service, is now using 600 gigs of data a month as this -- which has steadily increased as this crisis has unfolded, but it was over 450 before the crisis started. So it's -- there's a lot of consumption on all these devices, and most of that's on small cells, and most of those small cells are ours.

So when we look at our MVNO, there are opportunities to put some small cells in some places where there's enough traffic volume to justify the capital and Spectrum costs of doing that and moving traffic off the MVNO onto our network. It's not the majority of data use, but it's an opportunity, and -- but it's also an opportunity to create new product and market opportunities like I said earlier in terms of -- in businesses and in farms. And even on in your yard, there's a lot of places -- where I live in Connecticut, cellular service is poor. And so if you have an augmentation, which you do with WiFi, but if that augmentation extends to your whole property, you can see how using licensed and unlicensed Spectrum together with WiFi -- which WiFi is unlicensed but using unlicensed and licensed or unlicensed different Spectrum than WiFi like CBRS, you can create opportunities to either make your products better or to, in some cases, take traffic off your MVNO.

Unknown Analyst

And if you can take traffic off the MVNO, what do you do with those cost savings? Do you plow that back into being more aggressive in taking even more market share? Or do you kind of rightsize the cost structure of that business so that you can eventually make it profitable?

Thomas Rutledge

Well, I don't think of any flow of cost savings or cash as having anything to do with a new investment, but -- per se. So I never -- I don't think in those terms. But to the extent that your mobile business costs less to operate -- and the alternative is just to have lower MVNO rates. That's a good deal, too. The better off your mobile product is and -- in the marketplace. And it's really an adjunct product to our WiFi product when you really think about it. When you think about most people who have a mobile phone, use most of their bits, most of their data on -- not on the mobile network. So a mobile device is really a -- preponderantly just a screen and a mobile device 20% of the time. And that's kind of really -- it isn't time based, but if you just think about it in usage terms, 80% of the value of a mobile device is -- it's fixed location use. And so I look at our mobile business as an enhancement to our broadband business. And so to the extent that I can provide mobile at good prices for customers, I can create a lot of mobile growth for the purpose of driving satisfaction in my core business.

Unknown Analyst

Tom, last year, AT&T indicated that they would be open to the idea of competing for your MVNO agreement. Can you just tell us where negotiations stand with respect to alternatives to Verizon or supplements to Verizon or just where your relationship with Verizon is at the moment?

Thomas Rutledge

I won't tell you exactly where we are, but we have a good relationship with AT&T. We just did a big programming deal with them on multiple fronts. And we have had discussions about the MVNO. We didn't do them together because it got very complex but very interested in having a relationship with us, and we're interested in having a relationship with them.

Unknown Analyst

We have just a few minutes left, so I thought I would kind of zoom out a little bit to a bigger set of questions, which is when we went into this crisis, we looked at Charter as being a business that would be much more resilient than most. But the framework for that, I guess, is to say you will be less negatively impacted than most companies.

Thomas Rutledge

Right.

Unknown Analyst

By looking at your first quarter results, there's a case to be made that you won't just be less negatively impacted, that you may actually be positively impacted by the spotlight that this shines on the network advantage that you've got versus your competitors. I wonder if you can just kind of talk about that for a second and think about the opportunities that this creates for Charter given the network superiority that you enjoy at the moment.

Thomas Rutledge

Right. Well, look, our investment strategy has been to compete for the future. And we put ourselves in the position we're in today by investing years ago, a number of years ago, to get where we are so that we would have an infrastructure to have better products at lower prices than our competitors. And interestingly, if you really look at what we've been doing, put video aside, the cost of broadband on a per-gigabit basis has been coming down dramatically. I mean here, we went from 450 to 600 gigs in a matter of months on average without a change in price. So the actual cost per gigabit is coming down and has been coming down for years. So we have -- we've been investing to be competitive and to be lower cost on a per-gigabit basis out for a number of years in front of wherever we think competition continues to come from, and we'll continue to do that. So we have that opportunity, I think, to stay in front if we keep investing in the right smart way to have products available for the marketplace. And they're reasonably priced products. If we can get our investments proper in terms of cost, then we can have low-cost, high-quality products. And when I think about the future as a result of the changes that have occurred as a result of the pandemic, the one thing I think that's changed is just people see the future of communications as being more significant. We thought that anyway. It's just a question of time. And like I said earlier, we've been projecting holograms in our labs and even at our management meetings because we think the world 10 years from now is going to look a lot different than it does today, and we think we have a really good chance of playing in that successfully. And if we're smart with our investments, we'll get there first.

Now there's still lots of risk out there. And the one good thing I think about our product, our broadband product's coming down in price on a per-gigabit basis. We can save people a lot of money on their mobile bills. And historically, if you look at the Triple Play back when we had wireline, people thought that we underpriced voice. I remember Ivan Seidenberg talking about Cablevision when I was there, saying that we had completely mispriced voice and we were foolish. The point was that we saved the people a lot of money on their telecom spends, and they then spent the savings on us. And I think we have that opportunity going forward even in a difficult market as long as we keep bringing our -- the value proposition up or the price down, which is really a combination of better products at lower prices. And I think we have the ability to do that because of the investments we've made and will make.

Video has been the most challenging part of that equation, though, because we've not had any control of our video pricing. And -- but suddenly, you see the secular trend developing toward à la carte, which is -- seems to be where we're going. And à la carte will ultimately be disadvantageous to customers in one sense. They won't have everything, and it'll cost more to get everything. But they'll have choice, and they'll actually be able to manage their video bills down. And they haven't been able to do that in the past without getting rid of everything. And so I think the trend from a video perspective in terms of our ability to work in the marketplace are actually moving in our favor. So I think we're in good shape, but we need to do the right thing.

Unknown Analyst

Well, Tom, I want to thank you very much for spending the time with us this morning. It's always a pleasure to speak with you. And on behalf of everyone on the call, I want to wish you and all your employees safety and comfort through all this process. So thank you for being with think us, Tom.

Thomas Rutledge

Well, thank you. And thank you for recognizing our employees. They've been doing difficult work in a very scary time and very successfully. And I'm proud of our whole company and its ability to execute in a very difficult situation. So thank you and all the best to you and your families.

Unknown Analyst

Thanks, Tom.