Our friends in the US at Rider Research publish something it calls Broadband Scorecard, and this quarter the report shows that for Q1 in the US the cablecos creamed the telcos in terms of broadband sales.
Comcast and Time Warner Cable added 278,000 and 201,000 broadband lines respectively while AT&T added just 46,000 and Verizon 54,000. Industry analysts are at odds over the explanation, although AT&T gained 170,000 pay TV customers, and Verizon some 176,000 whereas Comcast lost 138,000 and the top four cable operators lost some 185,000 TV customers between them ‘ so perhaps it’s a matter of marketing emphasis.
Over the same period the Scorecard shows that Comcast added 555,000 fixed telephone lines, with Time Warner gathering 251,000 and cable generally around 1 million, while all telcos lost almost 3 million with over 2.5 million of those coming from AT&T and Verizon, who just about added all those customers back in their cellular operations, plus a few hundred thousand. However even Cablevision added more broadband lines than AT&T and almost as many as Verizon