Is Charter the Largest Rural Broadband Provider?

Charter CEO Chris Winfrey said that the company is the “largest rural provider today.” Charter was the largest winner of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) reverse auction in terms of passings and is slated to bring broadband to over 1 million rural homes and businesses. The company says it is ahead of schedule and has already built 40% of those passings. But does passing 400,000 homes make Charter the biggest rural provider in the country? It’s hard to get specific statistics from the big providers, but it’s hard to imagine that CenturyLink and Frontier don’t still have more rural customers than Charter. In all fairness, rural DSL customers are the prime target for Charter and everybody else who is building rural networks – but it’s unlikely that Charter has yet eclipsed them in customer counts.