“As a result, we now expect to spend approximately $1.5 billion this year on the rural construction initiative.”

In context

“t 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 initiative in the quarter, and the vast majority of that spend is accounted for in line extensions. 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 belt. As a result, we now expect to spend approximately $1.5 billion this year on the rural construction initiative. We spent $96 million on mobile-related CapEx, which is mostly accounted for in 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 ru”