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Intellectual Property Law

: IP Democracy

Cable Telephony Tops the 13-Million Mark

By Cynthia Brumfield

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I pointed out yesterday that the telcos keep losing a weirdly steady number of landline voice customers each quarter, around 2.3 to 2.6 million traditional customers lost each quarter.

Around half of those defectors are now cable voice customers, and according to the latest Q4 07 tallies, cable's phone business now tops the 13 million mark. As the table below shows, at the end of Q4 07, the top cable companies served 13.3 million voice customers, mostly digital voice (as opposed to the still-in-existence circuit-switched cable voice service).

Cable Telephony Subscriber Counts
	4Q06	4Q07
Brighthouse Networks*	412,050	503,852
CableOne	2,925	58,640
Comcast**	2,519,000	4,553,000
Cox***	2,023,000	2,380,000
Cablevision**	1,214,000	1,592,000
Charter	445,800	959,300
Insight****	118,200	186,200
Mediacom	105,000	185,000
Time Warner**	1,860,000	2,895,000
Total	8,699,975	13,312,992
Quarterly Adds.	1,029,320	1,184,094
Total Telephony Homes Passed by Group	97,891,360	109,664,048
Subs. % of Telephony Homes Passed	8.9%	12.1%
*EMDI estimates.
**Includes sequentially decreasing, and increasingly trivial, amounts of legacy circuit-switched customers.
***EMDI estimates for Q307
****Post-split with Comcast.
Source: Company reports and Emerging Media Analysis estimates. � 2007.

Two-thirds of those customers come from three companies: Comcast, Time Warner and Cox. During the full year 2007, the cable group nearly a combined five million voice customers, with penetration rising from 8.9% to 12.1%.

It's hard to say that cable's growth on the telephony front has slowed down. One of the operators, Insight, just reconfigured itself on 12/31/07 by disbanding a partnership with Comcast and no good quarterly data are available for any quarters but for Q4 06 and Q4 07.

But cable's still got plenty of room to grow. At the end of 2007, cable telephony capable plant passed nearly 110 million U.S. homes, or around 96% of all U.S. homes.

Full post as published by IP Democracy on March 05, 2008 (boomark / email).