Today I ask the question if there are really any cable companies left in the US. This was prompted by seeing an article that the Shrewsbury Electric and Cable Operations (SELCO), the municipal cable provider in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts announced to the Board of Selectmen that they are no longer a ‘cable company’. They have always been a traditional cable company in that they deliver their signals to customers over a coaxial cable network. They originally only used that network to deliver the cable product. But over the years they added telephone and broadband service, and from a customer perspective they look the same as any other triple play provider which delivers these same services over copper or fiber.

This announcement was prompted by two facts. First, the company sells broadband to more homes and businesses than it sells cable TV service. And that is due, in part, to the fact that it is seeing customers abandon cable service in favor of watching streaming video over the Internet.

Shrewsbury is not unique and most of my other small triple play clients are in this same position. SELCO is unique only in that they announced it formally, which made it into the press and onto my desk. Except for some tiny rural cable companies that only sell cable service, it’s hard to imagine that every other cable company is not in the same position. And you can’t find a telco that doesn’t sell more broadband than telephone. In fact, it’s hard to find a telco any more where more than half of the customers have a landline – only in places where the cellular coverage is terrible.

The biggest company to make this announcement was Comcast. Over a year ago CEO Brian Roberts announced that Comcast was no longer a cable company. A quarter earlier their number of broadband customers had surpassed their cable customers, and since then broadband penetration is still growing steadily while cable customers are shrinking.

And yet the industry still refers to Comcast as a cable company. We still refer to AT&T as a telco even though they are primarily a wireless company. The use of these monikers comes from the technology being used – the technology, and the vendors that support each technology are different for those operating telephone copper networks, cable company HFC (hybrid Fiber Coax) networks or fiber. Yet, from a customer perspective these different kinds of companies sell the same thing – with the differentiator being their broadband speeds.

I struggle with this as a blogger since there are a lot more similarities between Comcast and AT&T than there are differences. Calling one a telco and the other a cable company no longer makes much sense. When taking about the whole industry I usually refer to triple play providers as ISPs or carriers.

We don’t have a good short word to describe companies that use their networks to sell the triple play services, and which now also other services like security, smart home, managed WiFi, etc. The word ISP really isn’t adequate because there are plenty of companies around that only sell Internet access. Those are ISPs in the strictest sense.

And carriers is an inadequate description. That’s an old telecom phrase that was used mostly to denote the bigger companies in the traditional telephone industry. But size of company is no longer a differentiator – from a product perspective, many smaller companies today have a more robust product offering than large companies like Frontier or Windstream.

What really starts making this difficult is that a lot of smaller ISPs are abandoning or thinking about abandoning cable TV service. They are finding that they can barely buy the raw programming for the retail prices offered with the smaller satellite cable packages. Small ISPs are quickly becoming double play providers, and they won’t fit into any description that includes the triple play.

So please bear with me when you see me referring to companies in this industry with descriptors that don’t really fit what they do for a living. If any of you have a better idea of what to call these companies I’m open to suggestion.