CableCos Vs Bells & The Line Losses
Source: gigaom.com
“While the phone companies are only just starting to dig up your yard, cable is already in your house,” Dick Parsons, CEO of Time Warner laying down the smack on the phone companies. He has a point…
On the data side, phone companies added 1.513 million broadband connections, while cable companies added 909,000 connections so far, with Cox and Cablevision yet to weigh in .. my guess is that the quarter will be a tie for the two companies.But cable companies are hitting phone guys where it hurts the most…the voice business.
- BellSouth - total access line declined 6.1% (238,000), residential lines declined 8.8% (120,000) to bring down the total access lines were 19.8 million.
- AT&T saw 6% (600,000) drop in access lines to bring down the total to 48.8 million
- Verizon lost 7% (830,000) access lines to bring the total down to 47.97 million
- Qwest lost 5.2% of total access lines.
That works out to about nearly 1.75 million lines. I suspect some portion of it is going to wireless providers (which are mostly Bells without wires…) because people just want a cell phone. Still, in comparison to phone companies, cable guys added 550,000 voice customers. Cox/Cablevision are yet to report.
- Time Warner Cable added 270,000 VoIP customers.
- Comcast added 211,000 (lost about 70,000 old voice connections bringing the total net new adds is 141,000)
- Charter added about 69,600 Voice customers.
- Vonage added 283,000 new customers.
