Charter Communications, Inc. (CHTR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everybody. Good afternoon to those of you joining us from London and the continent. Thank you for joining us for the Eighth Annual MoffettNathanson Media and Communications Summit, and I'm really delighted to have Tom Rutledge from Charter joining us for his eighth year. Tom, you've been with us every year, and I went and look this up. The first time you joined us in May of 2014, your stock was trading at $135 at the time. 7 years later, it is trading at 5x that price. It's a compound annual return of about 26% per year. So you and Charter have a lot to be proud of over that period. So Tom, thank you for joining us.

Thank you. I hope the next 7 years look good.

So Tom, let's start with the broadband business because it's -- the topic that's on everybody's mind is after the blowout year of 2020 and the COVID bump that all broadband providers got, what gives you confidence about the sustainability of growth? I know you've talked about it. Sort of it's going to ebb to some degree from the 2020 levels. But talk about how you -- whether that's just a pull-forward or what the growth trajectory for broadband looks like from here.

Well, as I said previously in our earnings projections, I thought that we would continue to sort of stay on the track that we were on prior to 2020 and that 2020 was an anomaly. And that essentially what was happening prior to 2020 is that we were growing, and we are actually growing at an accelerating rate. And so I thought that I think that 2021 will have us revert to the kind of marketplace that we were in prior to the pandemic, and that we would get back on that trend line that we were on. And it's -- and I think so far, so good. It's proving out. There are issues still in the marketplace that are impacting growth in -- as a result of COVID. Move activity is low, extremely low. On the other hand, nonpay and bad debt are extremely low as well. All that means that to a share taker like us, there's less volume of activity, which means there's less transactional opportunities. So you've got this balance, but it's gradually reverting towards where it was in terms of activity, and we see more every month. And so things look like they're normalizing from that perspective. And so we anticipate that we'll continue to grow kind of like we were previously. And the reason we think that, that will grow like we were previously is that the competitive environment is still similar. We have very good products. We have good prices. We're still way underpenetrated in terms of the opportunity. And so I think that our tactics will continue to generate the kinds of results that they have previously.

So Tom, one of the -- this is a topic of conversation today of all days because the window opens today for the EBB, the Emergency Broadband Benefit, and the FCC just set rules yesterday for the expanded E-rate program. So there's a lot of stimulus dollars aimed at broadband. Can you talk about that from 2 perspectives. One is your operational readiness, what you've done to get the organization ready to take orders and make sure there's awareness about the availability of those programs. And then second, what do you think that can potentially mean in terms of volumes for your business?

Well, it's hard to say. But we do like the EBB program conceptually. We think that having -- and it's of limited duration at the moment. But in terms of -- to the extent that there are people that can't afford broadband -- and it's actually a smaller number than most people think it is. But to the extent that, that's true and there's a direct subsidy to the consumer, and the consumer can pick the technology and the company that they want to pick with that subsidy, we think that makes the most sense from a regulatory and from a social functional perspective, meaning it will work. And so we're ready to sell into that program. We're ready to market it. We're -- we are marketing it. And we have a database of where those customers will be, and we will manage that market to the best extent we can and create as many customers as we can. It's hard to say exactly what that will be because we've been really successful already with those kinds of programs and our customers. We've already got a Spectrum Internet Assist program where we offer very low-cost broadband to families that are on the school lunch program, for instance. And we've expanded that to SNAP and other criteria through the pandemic. But we've been selling low-cost broadband for a while. So how much the subsidy will impact that sale or whether it will just shift the customer base and who's paying for it, hard to say. But we're ready to maximize the opportunity. In terms of the other funding for schools, and their ability to connect, that's a real opportunity for our business sales area, our enterprise group. And we're also prepared to go sell that product. And those are long-lead-time sales generally. But -- and even in the crisis, it's been surprising how difficult and how long it takes to get a school district to purchase a broadband relationship from us. Whether that's direct-to-consumer or whether that's internal, it's just the nature of that sales process. It's quite slow, and maybe the pandemic will be over by the time the sales come in. But the -- we're out trying to exploit that opportunity.

So there's another, obviously, large part of the broadband growth story for you, and that's what you did in RDOF, where you were the largest winner with $1.2 billion of subsidies for some $5 billion of construction. Can you just take us through, again, what is the time line for that? Sort of when do we start to see the build start to hit CapEx? And when do we start to see the subsidies start to arrive in EBITDA? And then second, is your plan to pursue those markets with your existing pricing plans? Or as I understand it, there's the opportunity to charge them a different price based on the cost of serving the market.

Yes. Our thought was that we would price RDOF customers the same as we price any other customer. And I suppose you can make the argument that you could have a 2-tiered pricing structure, and it is permitted. But I'm not sure how practical that is from a marketing perspective or operating perspective. And we don't need a different price to make the economics work. So when we bid in the RDOF process, our bid assumed that we'd be charging the same rate as we change everywhere. Our -- the reason we bid was twofold: One, we think that there's an opportunity to create customers in places where they don't exist today. And there is an obligation on our part as somebody who's capable of providing broadband to unserved areas, to try to do so. And so it is, I think, the biggest political issue, so to speak, with regard to broadband is how to get the unserved areas served. And so we want to contribute to that effort. But we also want to do it in a way that makes long-term sense where we get a customer relationship that has value, both to the customer and to us. We think we can do that if the -- in the bidding process that we just went through. So we're going to build this project. It's a massive commitment. It's in over an 8-year period that you make the commitment, and at the end of this year, we'll be just ramping up the beginning of that construction. The construction is actually huge in volume. The -- Charter has around 0.75 million miles of infrastructure today. This new RDOF, which is 2% of our passings -- would be 2% of our passings approximately if we complete it all, will be another 120,000 miles. So it's significantly less-dense, massive infrastructure project. That said, we can do this project at the prices that we just described, and we can do this project at the capital investments that we think it will take. But it is big, and there's more to do. So physically getting it done is a big deal. Getting a labor force in the markets where we're going to be is going to be difficult. The skill sets don't exist. Clearing the poles and getting makeready done is actually a big deal because the utility companies that exist in the rural areas don't have the staff or the capabilities to get the work done. And so it's going to take time to build it out. And it's going to take time -- we think that there are some things that we can do from a regulatory perspective to make it go faster, and we're promoting those ideas with regard to clearing poles and doing makeready ourselves on behalf of utility companies. But I can't overemphasize how much of a big project this is. It's physically large. And it's capital-intensive, and it's going to take time to build. And the subsidies come in as you complete phases of the project and they go actually into the operating expense -- against the operating expense of the company. Actually, they're revenue, but they're not -- they don't go through the capital budget line. So we'll have to train people how to look at our P&L going forward and its impact from a RDOF perspective. But the bottom line is we can create a return on investment that's good, and we can create long-term growth for the company.

It seems like there's a lot of people that are looking at the fiber opportunity and revisiting the idea of building fiber, some in rural areas like yourself, but obviously more telco overbuilding in -- of cable operators like Charter. Can you talk about your expectations for the competitive environment going forward? Are you -- when you think about fixed wireless broadband, LEO satellites and telco overbuild, how does that change the landscape in -- that you're competing in over the next few years?

Well, it is a changing landscape. And we're in a very competitive environment today, and we're investing for the competitive environment of the future. And it is a rapidly evolving opportunity. And it's important, too, that the infrastructure of the United States gets built so that it -- from a national perspective, the country has great communication services on a world-wide relative basis in terms of being competitive. And so we think that our network will continue to allow us to invest in our network in a way that's very economical and also provides massive increases in capacity and, therefore, allows us to be competitive. We compete against 3 mobile broadband companies, maybe a fourth up is coming. We compete against new satellite businesses that are being launched. We compete against fiber and telephone overbuilders. And we do very well today with the opportunity in front of us. We've also invested in spectrum, and we're building out a converged mobile broadband platform, to some extent, using CBRS spectrum. And that, along with our ability to upgrade, I think, will allow us to continue to compete and to win in the marketplace. I said in our call that we're really underpenetrated and our takeout of communications revenue per household compared to the big mobile broadband companies, telephone companies. And if you compare them to us on how much money is coming out of each household, we think that we're very underpenetrated and have lots of room in front of us to create high-value products for customers at lower prices than they currently pay.

Well, we'll talk about the wireless aspect of that in a second but I want to -- one last question about your broadband business. Because I thought it was interesting on your last conference call. You mentioned DOCSIS 4.0. But maybe more interestingly, you talked about the 1.2 gigahertz strategy and the ability to increase your both uplink speeds and downlink speeds. I wonder if you could just take us through that a little bit for the service road map for the next couple of years for the physical plant.

Sure. There are a bunch of tools that we have actually available to us to increase the capacity of our plants. And right now, our infrastructure, which held up very well during the pandemic, which caused a massive increase in utilization of broadband, by the way, upstream and downstream, we were properly positioned to handle that massive increase in growth because we build headroom into our infrastructure. Going forward -- a few years ago, we used 3.1 to upgrade our DOCSIS network. And for a relatively small dollar amount, less than $10 a home pass, we took the capacity of the broadband network up enormously. 3.1, which we built, has the capacity of going up to a larger downstream capacity and a larger upstream capacity, depending on how you split the upstream and downstream. The network would allow for a drop in amplifier change without changing out the passives, the drops and all of the hard parts of the network, which is where the big money is in upgrading. It would allow you to -- you could do an electronic upgrade at a relatively low cost and get multi-gig downstream speeds and a gig upstream or possibly more. And you'd have enormous capacity for years to come. And that would be a relatively minor capital investment compared to a fiber overbuild, for instance. And so we have that opportunity in front of us. We also have DOCSIS 4.0, which is being developed. And DOCSIS 4.0 allows us to use the same spectrum, up to 1.2 gigahertz, which is where the passives are designed currently, to change out electronics and do a symmetrical Full Duplex service. There's 2 parts of DOCSIS 4.0, though, in terms of the specification. There's that Full Duplex aspect to it, but there's also an expanded spectrum piece. So you can go beyond 1.2 to 1.8. And actually, in the labs, we've gone up to 3.2 gigahertz bandwidth spectrum. And so each one of those things can be used in -- together incrementally or in specific applications, MDUs, underground, that can be used in commercial applications, or they can be used ubiquitously. And so we have the ability, we have the pathway, we think, to continuously stay competitive, state-of-the-art. And to do that at a relatively lower capital cost than our competition.

Usually, this is the point in the conversation where we turn to video, but I want to turn to wireless instead and maybe spend more time on wireless today. And I want to sort of talk about the evolution of wireless for you guys in that wireless, it seems to me started -- the conversation for most operators started as a churn reducer. It was very much focused on that sort of consumer bundle. And it seems to have evolved a bit to now being about the network and connectivity more broadly. I wonder if you could just talk about the strategic role that you think wireless plays in the business going forward. And how important it is in your future plans for ensuring the growth of Charter as a business.

Sure. Look, I think wireless is an aspect of mobile is -- of connectivity. Most of the functions of a wireless device are using the kinds of capacities that we deliver in the home. And most of the use of those mobile devices in the high-capacity environment is in a sedentary home or office environment, not in a mobile environment. And yet you still need a mobile capability because the device needs to be able to be connected wherever it is. And so all mobile operators have roaming relationships where people are on other networks in their own. And I look at our MVNOs as that in a strategic way. And I look at our opportunity to create customers that buy mobile services and to create those customers along with the capabilities that we add through our broadband network, which are vast, and to converge the product itself into a single product. And if you look at the total price that people pay for that single product today, I think we can grow significant market share at much lower prices than people are currently paying. And so I think mobile represents the opportunity for us to save people money and give them better products than they have today. And those are good business opportunities.

Do you think of it as sort of part of your broadband pricing strategy, for example, the double-play bundle of wireless and broadband as a way that you can -- you sort of talked about on your call the importance of thinking of them together.

Yes. Yes. No, I do. I think you have to look at the total price of both products and -- but from a functional point of view, they become one. The mobile is just a subset of connectivity. And...

So -- sorry, go ahead.

No, I was good. So when the device is in the broadband, fixed wireline part of the business -- which is also wireless, by the way. It's WiFi 6 and its capabilities. It's CDRS and its capabilities. And when it's in that form, it has more capacity and capability than the mobile platform. And when it's in the mobile platform, it's state-of-the-art as well. So the combination of the product is bigger than the component pieces.

So let's think about the network for a second. Because your CBRS strategy, you bought, I think, 210 licenses in the CBRS auction for a little less than $0.5 billion.

Right.

The -- the plan there is obviously to use your existing facilities to support -- am I putting words in your mouth to say it's largely a strand-mounted small cell strategy for offload? Can you talk about sort of when do we see that? And what do you need to learn to find out how much traffic you can offload onto that network?

Right. Well, we know where the traffic is already. So we know where to put the CBRS radios to get the maximum offload capability. So we know the answer to that question today. We are building out our first market by the end of this year and putting it into a practical model, meaning we know where the traffic is. Now we're going to make sure we know how to make it all work and move the traffic appropriately. And then we'll start to roll it out. There's an issue, too, in terms of timing with dual-sim handsets and their penetration of the marketplace. So it's a number of years yet before you get the full benefit of the CBRS offload strategy. But essentially, it's a twofold strategy. It's an offload strategy, and that's where you place your capital. But it's also an experience opportunity. And there's more to CBRS than that radio connectivity opportunity and just offload. It can be used as a line extender. It can be used to cross industrial zones so that you can access other radios or other communications facilities, including fixed wireline broadband in a facility where you don't have -- where it would be very expensive to create a physical network. And so it has the opportunity to sell building services. It has an opportunity to sell extended reach within a yard or a farm or a factory. So it's an offload strategy, but it's also a market creation opportunity.

Tom, Comcast just changed their pricing for wireless in a fairly aggressive way and really made their service much more competitive for 3-, 4-, 5-line families. Are there any impediments to you doing the same thing? And what would you want to see from either your business or theirs to help you decide whether that was something that you wanted to do as well?

Well, we -- I think that they're smart and they're taking advantage of the strategic opportunity that I was speaking to earlier in terms of pricing. And I think there's -- I am interested to see how they do with it. We've considered similar pricing mechanisms. And we will be driving price going forward. And I don't know -- I don't want to say exactly when and how we're going to change pricing. But I think that in the end, we'll have less expensive mobile products than most people.

Interesting. And Comcast just hit breakeven on their stand-alone business. It's hard to see what the economics of -- for us as outside observers, what the economics are because of the comingling of customer acquisition cost with the ongoing base. But is it fair to assume that the economics for you are such that the base of customers that you already have is a profitable base today and that what we're seeing is essentially the customer acquisition cost of the new cohort just keeping that as a drag on EBITDA for the time being?

Yes. We actually have less customers than Comcast at the moment. We're a year behind them in terms of our launch. And we have a smaller footprint, a slightly smaller footprint. So yes, they've reached a point that we'll reach, all other things being equal. But they aren't all equal. Your rate of growth will impact that number, obviously, which just has to do with Charter in general. The faster Charter grows, the -- there's more pressure on their margins than a company that isn't growing as fast, for instance. But from a breakeven perspective, we said previously that about 2 million customers was all we needed to sort of make the business profitable, and that's true. And that proved out to be true. So the difference between us and Comcast is at the moment, I believe, is where we are in the cycle and how much new growth we have versus how much base.

Is -- you want to -- I'll see if I can get you to give us some long-term guidance. How big can that business be? And can it be a real contributor to profitability as well as just revenue?

Yes. Yes. No, it's profitable in the sense that -- back to the converged notion. But to the extent you create a customer that raises your ARPU, but saves the customer money on their household spend and creates additional EBITDA per customer for you that both allows your existing base of customers to be more profitable and your incremental growth opportunities to be greater because you're more valuable, that's a really attractive model. And I think that's what mobile does for us.

So I want to turn to video now. You always have interesting insights for us about the video business each year. It's an industry that right now, for traditional distributors, is shrinking at about 7.5% a year. Ratings for cable networks and broadcasters are down in the -- are falling by 20% or so. And programmers are taking a lot of their best content, moving it to DTC services, including things like the NFL now. So if I kind of zoom out to 30,000 feet, I wonder how you think about the business, particularly when it comes time for affiliate renewals and negotiations. How do you think about negotiating in an environment where Nielsen ratings are down in the 20s and -- negative 20s and content is being strip-mined for DTC?

Well, obviously, it changes the dynamic. And it's an interesting problem because if you think about where many of the content distributors are, they'd be much better off not blowing up the existing model just now. Because they -- it produces an enormous amount of money still, and particularly relative to what their direct-to-consumer opportunity is. And so to the extent that they want to get pricing power out of their existing distribution and they overdo it and end up not being carried and breaking out of the bundled distribution, they end up with less. On the other hand, if they keep the rates low or don't raise them or make them go backwards, they are still going backwards and it doesn't feel very good, and it's hard to do as a business. But on the other hand, it's better than the alternative. And so that's the dilemma that content companies are in. And then we have the other side of that, negotiation, we have to decide what's -- whether it's worth preserving the remittance of the bundle or knocking -- not paying what somebody is asking for from a rate increase perspective.

Is there a point when drops start to mount to the point that the whole system sort of unravels? And that simply the linear model, as we know it today, isn't supportable anymore?

Well, it's hard for me to believe that there won't be linear TV at all in the near term that -- so I think the model is under pressure. It's been under pressure for a long time. I don't think it's about to collapse, but I do think it's shrinking rapidly. And I think that the more likely scenario is that rates will moderate -- rate changes will moderate. And you'll still have a pretty expensive linear model that sports will be on, and there's still glue there with other content and promotion opportunities and advertising opportunities. And so I don't see it just collapsing. But obviously, it could. But I think it's more likely to slowly erode.

So your video subscriber base has been much stickier than most of the industries, which, again, I think sort of speaks to the differences in the way you think about pricing to some extent and bundling. But I wonder if you could talk about that. You've said that it's clearly going to accelerate, but the industry is shrinking at 7.5 and you're just now getting back to a small negative number after having been marginally positive year-over-year for a while.

Right. Well, we've done a couple of things. We packaged. We've made -- our view of the video product is it's expensive because it's expensive to us. But it's not that significant in terms of its business opportunity to us currently. And we'd rather have a happier customer relationship, and we'd rather have as much value in the home as possible in every relationship we create. But -- and we've also tried to give people savings by creating skinnier packages. We've created some OTT packages. If you look at our traditional multichannel video business, the big, fat expanded basic and basic bundle and the pay TV combo package bundle, those are shrinking. So our units aren't shrinking so much because we're shifting customers into different products. But there's a lot of pressure on the big, fat, everything product because it's very expensive. And we're somewhat masking that with our marketing tactics.

I want to switch to business services. That's a topic that -- there was a time when business services was the next big thing for this business. It's still growing faster than the overall business for most operators. For you, I think you're -- it's been a little muddled by the pricing transition for old legacy Time Warner cable. But is it still a real growth engine of the business? Do you still see it as a kind of major growth foundation?

Yes. I think there's a lot of opportunity in SMB, particularly. It has come back. It's not back fully to where its run rate was taking us, but it's been a nice -- we're up to a couple of million customer relationships. And we're taking significant market share and we have great products. And I think we can continue to drive it and grow that business nicely. It's still under some economic pressure because of the pandemic, but rapidly recovering. Enterprise, I also think if you look at our unit growth in enterprise, creating new, large business relationships, it's actually quite robust. We suffer a tailwind from our early success in cellular backhaul. We did a lot of those deals. Time Warner, particularly, did a lot of those deals. And the way they were created is we sort of took the good with the bad and bid on those towers, which we serve with fiber backbone, with high ROI and low ROI towers together. And so what's happened is those things have expired, the cellular companies have tried to get new carriers to give them lower rates to the good stuff. And that's happening -- it has happened. So there's been a lot of pressure on that base of existing cellular backhaul connections. But our individual business relationship growth is very robust, and so we're optimistic about the future of enterprise.

The enterprise segment, though, it would seem to me has been pretty heavily commoditized, where what used to be high-margin services, like ATM and SONET have largely been replaced with relatively commodity services, like just pure Ethernet IP connectivity. Is that still a business that you can make real money in, in serving large enterprises?

Sure. I mean we can provide connectivity at reasonable prices. And so yes. And there's a value-add opportunity there as well in the new world of managed services. They're different than the old managed services. But there's upside in managed services.

So let's talk about margins of the business. Over the last 3 years, you've grown your margins by about 500 basis points. And -- but inevitably, you're going to be compared to your competitors -- or your peers, I guess. Aside from accounting items, like allocations for corporate expenses that are handled differently at Comcast, for example, are there any particular reasons why your margins would be different than peers? As people inevitably look at the kind of margins that Cable ONE is posting and mid-50s margins just would have seemed inconceivable for cable operators 4 or 5 years ago.

Sure. Except if you go way back in cable, they were that, and I actually have a wide enough memory to remember it. So look, margins if you have everything the same, same product, same prices and mix, and one company's margins are way different than another, you say maybe that's an efficiency issue. But when you -- so you have to look at the totality of what is being sold and what the product mix is inside that package and look at the free cash flow coming out of the household is the way I think of it. You can look at margin, but it doesn't -- if you're not comparing it to an equal or same situation kind of entity, it doesn't have a lot of meaning. If you adjust and normalize everything, yes, I can tell you whether you're efficient or not. But if you're a high-growth company, you pay for that growth. You're creating EBITDA at a faster rate. You're creating free cash flow at a faster rate. You're creating long-term value at a faster rate with lower margins, which is how we think of ourselves compared to some of what people would call our peers. And so we don't -- I don't sit around looking at margin analysis between Charter and other companies. I look at the marketplace, what the consumer is spending in the marketplace, what opportunities there are for us to get that spend and turn that into operating cash flow from a household in aggregate and not with the margin against -- of that cash flow as against the revenue.

And it seems consistent with what you were just describing about the faster growth. Your pricing strategy as a company has always been somewhat more aggressive than your peers. That it's -- that you would skew toward lower prices and faster unit growth rather than the opposite. Is that still fair to say that, that is a sort of strategic North Star for you: grow units first and less focus on trying to grow pricing?

Well, yes. We're not a big price-taker. Most of our revenue growth comes from actual creating customers. And if you go back over the last 5 years or the last 9 years that I've been in Charter, that has been basically -- our basic approach. And if you go back and go through all that revenue growth, it's mostly driven by new customer creation and new product sales and not by rate. And yes, so that's the way we like to operate. I think there's -- it has -- it creates execution issues. Yes, growing faster is harder to manage in some ways. And it -- but I think in the long term, it creates more value. And having the customer relationship sooner rather than later, I think, if you ultimately have the technology and the capability of getting it, I think you should get it.

So let's wrap up with the topic that everybody loves to talk about, and that's M&A in the cable business. You've always talked about your desire to buy more cable. The last couple of transactions that we've seen in the industry, admittedly, very small, but Harris (sic) [ Morris ] at Altice and Hargray at Cable ONE went for presynergy multiples that were sort of astounding on their face. 18x and 24x EBITDA are not the kinds of multiples that people are used to seeing. It's got to be hard to get excited about M&A if that's where the market is, and that's what private sellers are expecting to get, isn't it?

Well, I -- are we at 24x? No. In that sense, it's interesting. But look, I think the faster you grow, obviously, the more you're worth in some ways, and you should have a higher multiple. With regard to really small assets, though, it's hard to equate them to a mature asset or a bigger asset. Ultimately, it's what you can do with that physical asset that you're buying and the customer base that's potentially there in -- that, that asset sits in front of. And that's the value of an asset. It's what you can get from the households they've passed.

So everybody wonders, are there -- and people talk about Altice and what else you could buy. Do you -- are you confident there are things out there to buy? Are there deals that are -- that can be done that are attractive to you?

Well, the -- our -- American Cable business is primarily family-controlled. And always has been, because of its nature, it's capital intensity, I think. But families sell when they want to sell, not when you necessarily want to buy. And so it's hard to predict when M&A opportunity will come along. But in the meantime, we think that Charter doesn't need M&A. I've said that when Charter was small before we did the Time Warner deal, before we did the Bright House deal. But when we did those deals, I thought they were opportunistic situations, and that's the way we look at it. But we've been buying our own stock because we think Charter is a good deal. And we've been effective in that buyback. We bought it at lower prices than the company is worth today. And so we're strong believers in Charter. We don't need anything beyond Charter to create a lot of value. But if there is an asset that we could take our skills and impose them on that asset in such a way that we create more value, we would try to buy it.

Interesting. So last topic is, you talked about share repurchases, and that's always been the way that you've return cash to shareholders is through buying back your stock. If there were tax changes, would you revisit whether dividends are an appropriate distribution of cash? Or is your long-term view still that it's best to have the flexibility of buying back stock instead?

Well, obviously, if the tax laws change and there's wildly different rates, we would maximize the return to shareholders in that tax environment. And whatever that calls for, we would do. But it's hard to say what that would be and what the rates would be and how different they'd be, depending on how you distributed the free cash flow of the business. But I'm not -- unless it changes, what we've been doing seems to have worked quite well.

So as a closing thought, Tom, I opened with how much value you've created over the last 8 years. Look out over the next 7 years and tell us what you expect to see over that period for Charter and for the cable business.

Well, it's a good question. When I talk internally to this company, I think that we do have a great future and that 7 years from now, we'll be a major player in communications, just like -- and we'll have the kind of growth that we've had over the last 7 years, in the last 10 years, last 40 years. We've been consistently a successful industry. I think we've been creative. We have a plant that is capable of being invested in and adjusted such that you can continue to get tremendous capacity out of it. And you can do that efficiently, and you can do it in a way that allows you to grow customer relationships and create new products, and do that without stopping and starting. And so I think it's been a great business. I think with the right kind of management, these assets can be very long-term assets. You need to continually invest in them. What kind of products we'll be selling in 7 years? I think they will be definitely more bandwidth-intensive than the ones today. How that will exactly manifest itself, I don't know. But we've done light field projections using our network. I think at some point, I don't know if it's in 7 years or 17 years, products will be available with 3-dimensional holographic presentation, both commercially and residentially. And I think our network will carry those products. And I think if we continue to properly invest in our network, follow the marketplace and take care of the customer, we can continue to grow as the consumers' needs grow. So I'm very optimistic about our long-term opportunity.

All right. Well, Tom, that's a great place to leave it. Thank you. I'm looking forward to next time we do this, doing it in person again.

Me, too.

But thank you for being with us this year and all the years before. And thank you for a great discussion today.

My pleasure. Thank you.