KeyBanc Capital Markets analyst Brandon Nispel recently said in an industry report that “There are reasons to believe that cable is permanently impaired.” By that, he believes that cable companies are going to continue to lose broadband customers as they compete with fiber and FWA cellular wireless.

The problem that cable companies are experiencing stems largely from the time when they enjoyed a near-monopoly status in broadband markets across the country, when their only real competition was DSL provided over copper wires. For well over a decade, cable company broadband customers grew by huge numbers each quarter as people abandoned DSL. The reason for the cable company decline today is that the monopoly is now over and cable companies suddenly have to compete with alternatives like fiber and FWA cellular.

Using the term ‘permanently impaired’ makes it sound like cable companies have inferior broadband. From a technology perspective, fiber is clearly superior to cable broadband. Fiber has lower latency and less jitter for a more reliable signal, and fiber can provide very fast or symmetrical upload speeds for customers who care about upload. But a technology comparison would give the nod to cable over FWA wireless. Cable speeds are faster, and wireless networks generally have more variability of signal over time.

But most customers don’t buy broadband based on the performance specifications. Households that don’t need a lot of upload are perfectly happy with cable company download speeds, with tiers available from 300 Mbps to over a gigabit. Surveys show that a lot of cable company customers are happy with the broadband speed and performance.

The cable companies have been investing in increasing upload speeds, which will satisfy a lot of their broadband customers. Whether they goose upload speeds to 200 Mbps with a mid-split upgrade or invest in symmetrical speeds with a DOCSIS 4.0 upgrade, the increased upload speeds will be enough to satisfy the large majority of households.

I don’t think that most of the households leaving cable companies are doing so because of the technical differences in the technologies, other than perhaps heavy gamers and others who care about the difference in latency and jitter. The cable companies are seeing customers leave because of the way they treated customers over the last decade.

A lot of customers soured over the years on cable companies because of cavalier customer service, where customers had long wait times on the phone, and cable technicians routinely showed up late for customer appointments. It’s been a running joke about how dreadful it is to be stuck in a Comcast call queue. Cable companies didn’t create loyal customers when they had a big rate increase every year for more than a decade, and now have base rates approaching $100. Customers grew frustrated when new customers got low prices while long-term customers continued to pay the full list price. I think it’s the millions of customers who have a sour taste in their mouth for the cable companies who are bailing when they finally have a reasonable alternative that is not DSL.

I’m starting to get public feedback that the big fiber companies like AT&T are headed down the same path as the cable companies. I’ve been contacted in recent months by several AT&T fiber customers who are unhappy with their fiber service. One told me about an outage that lasted for nearly a week before AT&T finally fixed the problem – and then offered them a $3 discount off the bill for their inconvenience. Another customer told me about regular short outages on AT&T fiber – and this customer originally left the cable company for AT&T for this reason. AT&T fiber won a lot of customers when they entered markets because they were cheaper than the big cable companies, but the company has now raised rates for broadband by $5 per month two years in a row, at a time when the company is bragging about record profits.

Nispel is right that cable companies will continue to lose customers. That’s a natural consequence of the end of a near-monopoly. But urban markets will eventually reach an equilibrium, and cable will settle in at a lower penetration rate. We already know what that looks like after seeing how Verizon FiOS and cable companies reached an equilibrium in the Northeast.

The story is not that cable companies are losing customers and are doomed. The real story is that the ISPs displacing them are repeating the same mistakes made by the cable companies, and the public isn’t going to like them any more than the cable companies. A colleague recently observed that competition in urban areas is largely illusory and we’re largely seeing competition between equally inept ISPs. I’m starting to think he’s right.