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Telephone Carriers Eclipsing Cable Companies in Broadband Market

7:00 am on May 12, 2006 | Category: Business, Internet, Telecom Services

Telephone operators have a good shot at overtaking cable companies later this year in the North American broadband internet market, according to an industry analyst.

Information Gatekeepers researcher, Clifford Holliday, says that the Bell companies are adding new DSL subscribers quickly enough to diminish the dominance of cable giants like Comcast in nationwide broadband deployment.

“It is pretty much trending the way I expectred,” Holliday commented after seeing first-quarter numbers. “Cable picked up a little bit this quarter but not a lot. The way Verizon and AT&T are going, they are just killing them. My real impression is that the telcos are just under-pricing them to death. I would be extremely surprised if the cable companies are able to stop this onslaught.”

As of March 31, the telecom companies had 44% of the total high-speed internet market, up from about 33% just two years ago. North American cable giants added just under 1.1 million broadband subscribers in the first quarter, while telephone carriers like AT&T, Verizon, BellSouth, Qwest, and Bell Canada managed to attract almost 2.7 million DSL users.

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