FCC says nearly 8.3M Irma-impacted cable subscribers still lack service

More than 8.275 million cable subscribers in Florida, Alabama and Georgia are still without service a week after Hurricane Irma began to ravage the region, the FCC said.

According to Multichannel News, the FCC’s Disaster Information Reporting System tallied the figure on Thursday. It was actually an uptick from the 8.19 million customers the agency counted a day earlier. 

RELATED: Charter’s Rutledge: ‘We will have more video customers three years from now than we do today’

“In Florida we have 1.2 million out, when I was in the car coming here,” Charter Communications Chairman and CEO Tom Rutledge said Tuesday, attending the Goldman Sachs Communicopia investor conference in San Francisco. (Rutledge’s comments come courtesy of a Seeking Alpha transcript.)

But, that's a significant impact it's hard to say what—when the power comes back on how many will actually require work,” Rutledge added. “But, my guess it will be 200,000 or 300,000 customers that will have some form of credit for some period of time.”

Rutledge stopped short of predicting how many customers Charter would lose on a permanent basis due to the disruption. Comcast, however, roiled its investor last week when it suggested that third-quarter video customer losses could be as high as 150,000, partly because of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. 

“If you step back and … look at the last trailing 12 months and you took the biggest number we announced—we said 100,000 to 150,000 video subscribers … I think we’d be 50,000 subs down for the 12-month period, basically the same as where we started. Our customer relationships will go up. Our cash flows up. Our revenues up. We don’t really see any change to any of that,” Comcast CEO Brian Roberts also said Tuesday at Goldman Sachs.