Jessica Fischer
Chief Financial Officer at Charter Communications
Thanks, Chris. Before discussing our third quarter results, I want to mention that today's results do not include any impact related to Hurricane Ian, which hit the East Coast in late September. Initially, approximately one million of our customers lost service primarily because of power outages, but our crews worked hard to repair our network and reconnect customers and they did a great job. Broadly speaking, our plant fared well despite the storm, and service was restored to nearly all impacted customers in a relatively short period of time. And while we expect our fourth quarter results to contain some bill credits, some incremental capex-related to plant replacement and some incremental operating expense related to store cleanup and call center labor, we expect the overall impact of Hurricane Ian on our financials and customer numbers will be very small.
Let's turn to customer results on slide five. Including residential and SMB, we added 75,000 Internet customers in the third quarter. Video customers declined by 204,000 in the third quarter following a programming pass-through increase in the second quarter. Wireline voice declined by 271,000. And we added a record 396,000 mobile lines. Despite the lower number of selling opportunities from our reduced activity levels, we continue to drive mobile growth with our high-quality, attractively priced service. Looking forward, we expect our new Spectrum One offer to drive accelerating mobile line growth.
Moving to financial results, starting on slide 6, over the last year residential customers grew by 123,000 or 0.4% year-over-year. Residential revenue per customer relationship was flat year-over-year with promotional rate step-ups and rate adjustments offset by a higher mix of non-video customers, higher expanded basic video losses in the last several quarters, and accelerated growth of lower-priced video packages within our base. Our year-over-year residential revenue per customer relationship growth was lower this quarter than last, given the timing of rate adjustments in this year versus last and the mix factors I just mentioned. Also keep in mind that our residential ARPU does not reflect any mobile revenue. As slide 6 shows, residential revenue grew by 0.7% year-over-year.
Turning to commercial, SMB revenue grew by 1.9% year-over-year, reflecting SMB customer growth of 3.3%. Enterprise revenue was up by 2.6% year-over-year, or by 5.2% year-over-year, when excluding some one-time fees from the prior period which were a benefit last year. Excluding all wholesale revenue, enterprise revenue grew by 9%. And enterprise PSUs grew by 4.9% year-over-year. Third quarter advertising revenue grew by 23% year-over-year, primarily driven by political revenue.
Core ad revenue was flat year-over-year with lower national and local advertising revenue, offset by our growing advanced advertising capabilities. Mobile revenue totaled $750 million, with $303 million of that revenue being device revenue. Other revenue declined by 2.1% year-over-year, primarily driven by lower video CPE sold to customers, mostly offset by rural construction initiatives subsidies. In total, consolidated third quarter revenue was up 3.1% year-over-year.
Moving to operating expenses on -- and EBITDA on slide 7, in Q3, total operating expenses grew by $278 million or 3.5% year-over-year. Programming costs declined by 3.8% year-over-year due to a decline in video customers of 3.8% year-over-year and a higher mix of lighter video packages, partly offset by higher programming rates. Looking at the full year 2022, we now expect programming cost per video customer to grow in the low single-digit percentage range.
Regulatory connectivity and produced content declined 7.4% year-over-year, primarily driven by lower video CPE sold to customers. For the full year 2022, we now expect regulatory connectivity and produced content expense to decline in the mid to high single-digit percentage range.
Cost to service customers increased by 4.4% year-over-year. Excluding bad debt from both years, cost to service customers grew by 3%, primarily due to higher fuel and freight costs, partly offset by productivity improvements. And while bad debt and non-pay churn were higher year-over-year, both remain well below pre-COVID levels. We now expect cost to service customers expense growth for the second half of 2022 to be more consistent with growth in the first half of 2022.
Marketing expenses grew by 9.3% year-over-year, primarily due to higher staffing levels and wages, as Charter focuses on providing better service to new and existing customers. For the full year 2022, we now expect marketing expense to grow in the high single-digit percentage range. Mobile expenses totaled $846 million and were comprised of mobile device costs tied to device revenue, customer acquisition, and service and operating costs. And other expenses increased by 4.4%, primarily driven by higher labor costs, higher advertising sales expense related to political revenue, and higher computer software expense, partly offset by lower corporate costs this quarter. Adjusted EBITDA grew by 2.4% year-over-year in the quarter.
Turning to net income on slide 8, we generated $1.2 billion of net income attributable to Charter shareholders in the third quarter, essentially flat with last year with higher adjusted EBITDA offset by higher interest expense.
Turning to slide 9, capital expenditures totaled $2.4 billion in the third quarter, above last year's third quarter spend of $1.9 billion. Most of that increase was driven by $525 million of spend on our rural construction initiatives in the quarter, and the vast majority of that spend is accounted for in line extension. In rural, we've accelerated our walkout and design nationally to allow for additional time for the process of securing full access. In addition, our access to inventory is improving, so we're carrying a more appropriate amount of inventory to support the bills. As a result, we now expect to spend approximately $1.5 billion this year on the rural construction initiative.
We've spent $96 million on mobile-related capex, which is mostly accounted for and support capital and scalable infrastructure and was driven by investments in back-office systems. Core cable capex, which excludes our rural and mobile capex, increased from $1.7 billion last year to $1.8 billion this quarter, driven by modestly higher CPE and scalable infrastructure spending. We continue to expect core cable capital expenditures to be between $7.1 billion and $7.3 billion for the full year 2022.
As slide 10 shows, we generated $1.5 billion of consolidated free cash flow this quarter, versus $2.5 billion in the third quarter of last year. The decline was primarily driven by higher cash tax payments and higher capex, mostly driven by our rural construction initiative. Excluding cash taxes, our rural construction initiative and litigation settlements, free cash flow grew by 5% year-over-year.
We finished the quarter with $96.8 billion in debt principal. Our current run rate annualized cash interest is $4.8 billion. As of the end of the third quarter, our ratio of net debt to last 12-month adjusted EBITDA was 4.48x. We intend to stay at or just below the high end of our 4 to 4.5x target leverage range. During the quarter, we repurchased 5.8 million Charter shares and Charter Holdings common units, totaling about $2.6 billion at an average price of $445 per share.
Operator, we're now ready for Q&A.