In a blog last week I talked about how cable TV subscriptions in the US had dropped for the industry as a whole for the year ending in the first quarter of 2015. But Leichtman Research Group has published the statistics for US broadband for the end of 2014 and this shows a very different story.
It’s obvious that the improving economy has helped broadband sales and the largest cable companies and telcos added 3 million new broadband customers in 2014, up 114% over additions in 2013.
Following are the statistics for 2014 followed by a few observations:
Top Cable Companies Total Added %
Comcast 21,962,000 1,277,000 6.2%
Time Warner 12,253,000 657,000 5.7%
Charter 5,072,000 432,000 9.3%
Cablevision 2,760,000 (20,000) -0.7%
Suddenlink 1,149,100 78,800 7.4%
Mediacom 1,013,000 48,000 5.0%
WOW 727,800 19,600 2.8%
Cable ONE 488,454 15,823 3.3%
Other Cable Companies 6,525,000 150,000 2.4%
Total Top Cable 51,960,354 2,658.223 5.4%
Top Telcos
AT&T 16,028,000 1,000 0.0%
Verizon 9,205,000 190,000 2.1%
CenturyLink 6,082,000 91,000 1.5%
Frontier 2,342,500 108,500 4.9%
Windstream 1,131,600 (39,300) -3.4%
FairPoint 321,624 (8,142) -2.5%
Cincinnati Bell 269,900 1,500 0.6%
Total Top Telcos 35,380,624 344,558 1.0%
Total All 87,340,978 3,002,781 3.6%
A few notes on the numbers. ‘Other Cable Companies’ includes Cox and Bright House Networks. These numbers do not include smaller cable companies, smaller telcos, CLECs, fiber over-builders or municipalities. Just as a point of reference, it’s estimated that there were 123.2 million households in the US at the end of 2014, so these large companies sold broadband to 68.4% of them. Total US broadband penetration is currently estimated at around 73%, meaning the rest of the market is served by companies not on this list.
Some observations:
- It’s obvious that large cable companies keep winning the battle for broadband and they captured 89% of the net additions for the year.
- The cable company net additions are 123% more than this group saw in 2013.
- Growth is slowing at the telcos and the 2014 numbers are 72% of the growth seen by the group in 2013.
- By adding almost 1.3 million broadband customers, Comcast now has more broadband customers than cable customers.
- AT&T continues to add U-verse customers but has been losing older technology DSL customers.