Christopher Winfrey
President and Chief Executive Officer at Charter Communications
Thanks Stefan. We had a busy quarter, executing our operating strategy and building on the foundational investments of the past couple of years. We're also successfully managing the transition of customers previously on the government's affordable connectivity program in a period of new competition. And while we expect some normalization of external factors as we head into 2025 and much lower capital intensity beyond 2025, we're not standing still, evidenced by the series of announcements we made in September, a market-leading customer service commitment, new pricing and packaging that makes better use of our unique assets in the marketplace, encapsulated in a brand refresh through Spectrum's Life Unlimited promise. There was a lot of flattering press about the importance of wireline networks and convergence this past quarter. We remain the only true convergence pure play in our footprint, with a fully distributed gig capable wireline and wireless network across a growing 58 million passings everywhere we operate, soon-to-be symmetrical and multi-gig in all of our communities.
Our seamless connectivity capabilities are evidenced by our continued market leading mobile growth. And in just over a year, we completed a full-cycle of programming renewals and the launch of Xumo to fundamentally reposition video again as an important part of the connectivity bundle, whether full value, hybrid, DTC linear packages, smaller non-sports streaming packages or the addition of a la carte programmer apps to our broadband and video customers. We're well positioned to provide seamless connectivity and this new form of seamless entertainment to customers wherever they want to go.
Before discussing the quarter, I want to express our sympathy and commitment to the communities across the Southeast impacted by Hurricanes Helene and Milton. These were devastating storms. The initial impact was significant, mostly because of power outages, down poles and trees and drops. All but approximately 10,000 of our customers, including homes and businesses fully lost have had their service restored. In particular, we're still very active in the Asheville, North Carolina area and some remaining pockets of Tampa Bay. I'd like to keep -- I'd like to thank our frontline personnel for their dedication and effort in keeping our customers connected. That includes our employees who live in the area and were directly impacted themselves and the teams of employees from across the country who volunteered to help in the restoration.
During the third quarter, we lost 110,000 Internet customers. We added 545,000 Spectrum mobile lines and over 2.1 million lines year-over-year. Revenue grew by 1.6% in the quarter, while adjusted EBITDA grew by 3.6%. Where it not for the impact of the end-of-the ACP program in June, we would have grown our Internet customers during the third quarter. Importantly, we've been successful in keeping low income households connected. We continue to compete well against both wireline overbuild and cell phone Internet, each with expanded footprints. And we remain confident in our ability to return to healthy long-term growth. Our Internet product is faster and more reliable. Our pricing is lower and similarly bundled with mobile. We expect market activity and selling opportunities to pick-up over-time and the cell phone companies will face challenges as customer bandwidth demands continue continued to grow.
As I mentioned, in the meantime, we're not standing still. In mid September, we made a series of important announcements, including the brand relaunch, a unique customer service commitment and a new pricing and packaging structure. Our strategy has not changed. We offer high quality products to customers in a package and at a price point that our customers can't replicate. We pair that with unmatched customer service.
Our fully deployed high bandwidth network with ubiquitous and seamless connectivity and entertainment products creates opportunities and removes barriers to help customers in every aspect of their lives, which led us to our new brand platform, Life Unlimited. While part of that is a new look and feel for the spectrum brand, it's also about our increasingly converged set of products and building more trust with our customers. Our new customer commitment is comprised of four key promises reliable connectivity, we're committed to keeping our customers connected 100% of the time and promptly resolving any issues. Transparency at every step, we're committed to clear and simple pricing and timely service updates and we will take responsibility when things go wrong. Exceptional service, we're committed to providing exceptional customer experiences. And finally, always improving, meaning we act on our customers' feedback to improve our products and customer service.
We backed up those commitments with guarantees. For example, to fix any service disruptions quickly, we commit to dispatch a technician the same day if the customer requested prior to 5:00 pm. If a customer needs help on a professional installation, a technician will be available the same or next day. We now back those commitments with proactive service credits if we miss the mark. We also don't have residential or SMB contracts. And if a customer is not completely satisfied with any services within the first 30 days, we give them their money back. We're making these commitments because we can, because we already made the investments in 100% US based sales and service with our own employees in frontline tenure through pay, progression, market leading benefits and tools and systems to make the job better for the employee and our customers.
Our Life Unlimited brand relaunch also includes new pricing and packaging that better utilizes our unique product assets, which work better together to provide lower promotional pricing and lower persistent bundle pricing. Our new pricing and packaging will drive more sales with higher sell in of our best products, grow customer ARPU at connect despite lower product pricing and reduce billing, service and retention calls while reducing churn. For example, we now offer our gig Internet product at $40 per month when bundled with two unlimited mobile lines and/or video. Customers that take the new double play will receive a two-year price lock and customers that take our new triple-play will receive a three-year price lock. And in that package, customers also get our top mobile tier Xumo and Cloud DVR at no additional charge.
For customers who want our popular Spectrum One offering that remains available. Now with a higher starting speed of 500 megabits per second with one free unlimited mobile line included for a year. Existing customers can also opt into our new bundles at persistent bundled pricing, and we have also increased Internet speeds for existing flagship and ultra customers. It's still very early, but so-far, our new pricing and packaging is showing promising results, including more video sell-in, more mobile lines per sale and more gig sell-in. I expect those results and broadband sales to accelerate with seasoning of our marketing and sales approach over time.
Our operating strategy remains simple, sell more products to more customers, driving higher penetration against our large fixed asset, reducing the operating capital cost per product with lower churn to ultimately drive more cash flow per passing. And we're making investments in that large fixed asset through our network evolution initiative, which brings multi-gigabit speeds to 100% of our customers. We've launched symmetrical Internet service in our Step 1 markets, including Reno, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Dallas-Fort Worth, Louisville, Lexington, Rochester, Minnesota and Rochester, New York. We're now broadly marketing our symmetrical speeds in seven of these eight markets. The high split upgrade process should be largely complete in all of our Step 1 markets by the end of this year.
We're making progress on Step 2 DAA in remote markets, and we've deliberately slowed these markets to get the software fully certified to our specs. That has pushed back equipment purchasing and operational deployment, and we now expect our network evolution initiative project to be completed in 2027. Excluding the benefit of future capital and operating cost savings, our network evolution has and will cost a very low incremental $100 per passing. We have full visibility to that outcome. We'll update our multiyear capital expenditures outlook, including the new phasing of our network evolution spend when we report our fourth quarter results in January.
In video, over the past year, we transformed all of our major programming agreements in a way that works for our customers and for Charter, including a recent early renewal of Warner Bros. Discovery and then NBCU. These agreements give customers greater overall package flexibility and the ability to include all the key streaming apps from programmers within our Spectrum TV select packages. That enables us to offer what we now call seamless entertainment, a first for the industry at no extra cost. We also have paths for customers to upgrade to the ad-free version of these apps, and we will sell programmer apps a la carte to broadband and skinny package video customers.
We also had the renewed support from our programming partners to get behind each other's products and distribution for a healthier video ecosystem and better choice and value for customers. More to come on this, but the inclusion of Max with its HBO content and TV select and how we plan to promote Max to our broadband customers and vice-versa will show how we and the programmers more broadly can support one another with their customers front and center.
By early 2025, we'll be providing our TV Select customers up to $80 per month of retail streaming app value at no additional cost, including the ad supported versions of Max, Disney+, Peacock Premium, Paramount+, ESPN+, AMC+, Discovery+, BET+, and ViX. Seamless entertainment, even easier with Xumo, which proves unified search -- search and discovery with a market-leading voice remote and the highest rated pay TV streaming app in the US. Over the last couple of years, we've moved away from bundling video and our offers because the value proposition to customers had fallen. We still have some work to do to operationalize the new customer proposition, including the customer front end for programmer app authentication and programmer credentials, but we're proud of what we can offer customers existing and new in terms of value and utility. And that breakthrough is why we are including video in the new bundles we launched in September.
Fundamentally, we believe that maintaining and evolving the video business even if it isn't growing helps customer acquisition and retention by making use of our scale and capabilities and adding more value into our unique seamless connectivity relationship. Video still has positive cash flow, and provides us with option value.
So a lot of exciting things happen in the third quarter. Our continued success in mobile is certainly one of those. Our mobile offering continues to evolve, driving strong results and supporting our new pricing and packaging efforts. We had our highest [Indecipherable] quarter ever. Our highest mix of ads on Unlimited Plus driving higher customer value and ARPU and our lines per customer continues to grow nicely. Today, approximately 8% of our total passings take our converged offering of Internet and mobile. So we remain under penetrated despite having a differentiated and superior offering, with market-leading pricing at promotion and retail.
As we work through the onetime impacts of ACP this year, new competition with expanded footprint and our unique non-recurring subsidized network expansion investment, we remain confident in our ability to drive healthy long-term connectivity customer growth. Now in the future, we have the best fully deployed network uniquely capable of delivering seamless connectivity or convergence everywhere we operate with pricing and packaging that saves customers money with the best products and a service capability investment that has yet to be fully realized as a competitive advantage.
Our team is executing well on these multi-year initiatives, a team that's hungry with a tremendous drive to win. For our customers, the communities we serve, our fellow employees and for our shareholders. Jessica?