Spectrum’s Chief Commercial Officer and CMO to step down at year-end
Key Highlights
- Nick Jeffery, Spectrum's new COO, is leading a management overhaul to improve customer service and accelerate decision-making.
- Spectrum lost 172,000 broadband subscribers in the recent quarter, highlighting ongoing competitive challenges from fiber and fixed wireless providers.
- The acquisition of Cox enhances Spectrum's capabilities in business services and fiber infrastructure, aiming to boost market position and growth opportunities.
- Spectrum Mobile added 406,000 lines in Q2 2026, with bundling strategies reducing broadband customer churn by nearly 40%.
- Jeffery's extensive telecom turnaround experience suggests a strategic focus on leveraging Spectrum's assets for market competitiveness.
Charter’s acquisition of Cox may still be fresh, but the newly integrated service provider is wasting no time realigning its top leadership.
Nick Jeffery, Spectrum's newly appointed COO, wrote in an email obtained by Lightwave and sent to company employees that Adam Ray, Chief Commercial Officer, and Sharon Peters, Chief Marketing Officer, will leave Spectrum at the end of this year.
Both executives have long careers in the cable and broadband industry.
Ray had spent over 20 years at Spectrum with increasingly senior roles across sales and field operations, including leading its Florida region for nearly three years. During his four-year tenure as Chief Commercial Officer, he oversaw marketing, residential sales, Spectrum Business and Community Solutions.
His team drove the commercial execution of Spectrum One, its $1,000 Savings Guarantee and the industry's first Customer Commitment, along with our video packages built around the Xumo Stream Box, and most recently introduced Spectrum to customers in the former Cox markets.
Following 16 years at Optimum and its predecessor companies, Peters joined Spectrum in 2016 and helped launch the Spectrum brand following the Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks transactions.
In her nearly five years as Chief Marketing Officer, she led brand strategy, advertising, customer insights, media planning and creative for residential, Spectrum Business and Community Solutions. In 2024, she introduced Life Unlimited alongside the Customer Commitment and oversaw the successful debut of Spectrum Mobile in 2018, marking the industry’s first converged offering of mobile with internet. Most recently, she oversaw the rebrand and launch of our products to the former Cox customers.
Jeffery, who became Spectrum’s COO in September after serving as Frontier’s CEO before Verizon acquired the company, said the management changes were part of a broader initiative to right the broadband ship after several quarters of declines and improve how it interacts with its customer base.
“There are three reasons for this change: to get closer to our customers, to move faster with fewer layers, and to focus on our two biggest priorities – returning to core Internet growth and improving customer service,” he said in an e-mail to Spectrum staff.
Broadband subscriber struggles
Spectrum, like its Tier 1 cable MSO counterpart Comcast, had enjoyed a long run of broadband subscriber growth.
However, in recent years, Spectrum continued to shed broadband customers due to increasing competition not only from fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) competitors including large incumbent telcos such as AT&T, but also from fixed wireless access (FWA) providers.
Spectrum’s struggles with broadband subscribers continued into the second quarter. The service provider lost 172,000 broadband subscribers, ending the period with 29.4 million Internet customers.
By comparison, AT&T added 646,000 total consumer and business Advanced Connectivity internet net adds, including 367,000 fiber and 279,000 fixed wireless subscribers in the second quarter.
Likewise, Verizon delivered 348,000 broadband net additions in the second quarter of 2026, up 12.3 percent year over year. This includes total fixed wireless access net additions of 193,000 and 155,000 fiber broadband net additions.
Although it doesn't offer the same speeds and reliability as cable or fiber broadband, FWA continues to gain traction with price-conscious consumers.
A new CTIA study found that whenever 5G Home internet was introduced in a market, it drove down cable prices 17%, saving American households up to $28.5 billion from 2023 through 2025.
Jeffery noted that while Spectrum has the right assets to compete against fiber and FWA, the service provider hasn’t been able to leverage those elements to create a growth path.
“I am increasingly convinced that our unmatched scale in broadband internet, our distinctive video assets and attractive mobile offer are market advantages,” he said. “However, in recent years we have failed to marshal those advantages into a winning strategy and have underperformed the markets and our own expectations. In my first few weeks in the company, I’ve spent time carefully understanding how we operate and what we need to do to compete and win.”
Business, wireless opportunities
Despite the setbacks that Spectrum has seen on the consumer broadband side, the service provider’s acquisition of Cox enables it to enhance its business services position as well as wireless growth patterns with a
On the business services side, the Cox deal immediately strengthens its ability to serve all segments of the business market, from SMBs to large enterprises.
Charter and Cox have been consistently cited as leaders by Vertical Systems Group in domestic Ethernet and on-net fiber connections. In its most recent Mid-2026 U.S. Carrier Ethernet LEADERBOARD, Spectrum Business ranked fourth, while Cox dropped to seventh.
While the newly combined provider could advance its position in domestic Ethernet, VSG noted that Spectrum’s parent company, Charter Communications, completed the acquisition of Cox in August 2026, and the mid-year results do not include it.
Likewise, Charter and Cox held fourth and sixth positions on the 2025 U.S. Fiber Lit Buildings LEADERBOARD. Having a greater density of on-net fiber will enable the service provider to increase its business services market share.
Alongside business services, another potential growth opportunity for the combined company will be wireless—a factor that continues to matter for its business and consumer customers.
Amidst broadband declines, Charter reported that Spectrum Mobile added 406,000 lines in the second quarter of 2026, ending the period with 12.5 million lines.
For Charter’s consumer business, wireless creates greater customer stickiness.
Bundling mobile lines with home internet reduces broadband customer churn by nearly 40%, with mobile penetration sitting at roughly 20% of internet customers.
Similarly, Spectrum can play into how businesses (SMBs and large enterprises) continually rely on mobile. Charter along with Comcast entered into a multi-year exclusive agreement with T‑Mobile to utilize its network to deliver mobile services to their business customers across the U.S.
Given the possibilities the larger company can now pursue, Jeffery will likely emphasize that it can be a one-stop shop for consumers and businesses, with an even larger asset footprint.
Jeffery is no stranger to company turnarounds.
The over 30-year telecom veteran helped revamp Frontier from bankruptcy protection into one of the largest fiber broadband providers before Verizon acquired it. During the four years before Verizon announced a deal to acquire Frontier, the company invested $4.1 billion to upgrade and expand its fiber network and now derives more than 50% of its revenue from fiber products.
Earlier, he led one of Vodafone Group's largest businesses through a successful four-year, customer-centric turnaround and transformation.
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About the Author
Sean BuckleySean Buckley
Sean is the Editor-in-Chief of Lightwave. He establishes and executes Lightwave's editorial strategy across its website, email newsletters, events, and other information products. Before coming to Lightwave in July 2023, he served as editor of Broadband Communities. Earlier, he served as senior editor of FierceTelecom and the editor of the former Telecommunications Magazine. He got his start in the optical industry in 1998 when he became the editor of enterprise and optical networks at Information Gatekeepers. He has a BA in English from the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and lives in Dracut, Mass, with his wife, two sons, and his cat, Dove.
