As a nation we are approaching an 85% overall penetration of residential broadband. The following statistics come from the latest report from the Leichtman Group and compares broadband customers at the end of 2017 to the end of 2016.
| 4Q 2017 | 4Q 2016 | Change | ||
| Comcast | 25,869,000 | 24,701,000 | 1,168,000 | 4.7% |
| Charter | 23,903,000 | 22,593,000 | 1,310,000 | 5.8% |
| AT&T | 15,719,000 | 15,605,000 | 114,000 | 0.7% |
| Verizon | 6,959,000 | 7,038,000 | (79,000) | -1.1% |
| CenturyLink | 5,662,000 | 5,945,000 | (283,000) | -4.8% |
| Cox | 4,880,000 | 4,790,000 | 90,000 | 1.9% |
| Altice | 4,046,200 | 3,962,500 | 83,700 | 2.1% |
| Frontier | 3,938,000 | 4,271,000 | (333,000) | -7.8% |
| Mediacom | 1,209,000 | 1,162,000 | 47,000 | 4.0% |
| Windstream | 1,006,600 | 1,051,100 | (44,500) | -4.2% |
| WOW! | 730,000 | 718,900 | 11,100 | 1.5% |
| Cable ONE | 524,935 | 513,908 | 11,027 | 2.1% |
| Cincinnati Bell | 308,700 | 303,200 | 5,500 | 1.8% |
| Fairpoint | 301,000 | 306,624 | (5,624) | -1.8% |
| 95,056,435 | 92,961,232 | 2,095,203 | 2.3% |
These large ISPs control over 95% of the broadband market in the country – so looking at them provides a good snapshot of the industry. Not included in these numbers are the broadband customers of the smaller ISPs, the subscribers of WISPs (wireless ISPs) and customers of the various satellite services. Cable companies still dominate the broadband market and have 61.2 million customers compared to 33.9 million customers for the big telcos.
These overall numbers don’t tell the whole story since there is a lot of broadband upgrades happening around the country. Cable companies are starting to upgrade to DOCSIS 3.1 which will mean even faster download speeds. A number of telcos are building fiber to replace DSL, which they are hoping will stop the erosion of DSL customers fleeing to cable companies. There also is continued mergers in the industry, but Leichtman numbers include the impact from mergers into the prior year’s numbers – which is why the table of 2016 customer won’t match up with the same Leichtman table from a year ago.
It’s obvious that the cable companies are still taking DSL customers away from telcos in the cities of America. The cable companies added 2.7 million customers last year, and a significant percentage of these are from DSL customers converting to cable modems. But the telcos as a whole lost only 626,000 customers as a group. What accounts for this difference?
Part of the answer has to be the FCC’s CAF II program. The telcos were give money to bring broadband to over 4 million rural households and the telcos all report that they’ve finished some portion of that buildout by the end of 2017. But 2017 was only the second of a six year program and we should be seeing more broadband customers for AT&T, CenturyLink, Frontier and the other big telcos starting with the 2018 statistics.
The company that surprises me the most is AT&T. They told the FCC and stockholders that they had built fiber to reach 4 million new customers by the end of 2017, out of their goal of 12 million new potential new customers. This goal of 12 million new fiber passings was a condition of their merger with DirecTV. Perhaps they lost a mountain of DSL customers – but you would expect between CAF II and the new fiber builds to see an increase in AT&T broadband subscribers.
CenturyLink is also a bit of a puzzle. They say that they built fiber past 900,000 passings last year and I would have expected to see some benefit from that effort. Granted, they would have converted a lot of DSL customers to fiber, but you would expect them to finally have a competitive advantage with fiber compared to cable networks. And they also claim a substantial rural build from CAF II.
Probably the most important thing about broadband growth in 2017 is that is 30% less than the growth in 2016. We are finally seeing broadband reach it’s peak, and if the rate of growth continues on that curve we are only a few years away from reaching broadband equilibrium where the only broadband growth will come from new housing units entering the market. That will be the point when we will see the big ISPs panic and start struggling to find ways to satisfy Wall Street’s demand for ever-continuing profits.