Cable Phone Share Grows
By Staff -- Multichannel News, 10/1/2006 8:00:00 PM
Toronto — Toronto— A new study predicts that U.S. cable operators will have 24% of residential telephone customers at year-end 2009, up from a 5% share in 2005, while phone companies will have claimed just 6% of residential video customers by then.
Convergence Consulting Group’s twice yearly “Battle for the North American Couch Potato” report also indicated that regional Bell operating companies’ phone-line losses will hit 9% of the base in 2006, up from a 8% line loss in 2005.
The firm said 45% of U.S. cable companies’ residential customers take broadband service and TV from cable, versus 25% of phone companies’ customers taking digital-subscriber-line high-speed-Internet service along with voice service.
That helps cable to claim voice-over-Internet-protocol service customers at a rapid rate and, so far, the cable VoIP product has the edge over telcos’ local and long-distance packages, according to the study.
At the end of this year, cable companies should have about 31 million residential broadband customers, compared with 21 million residential customers taking phone companies’ DSL service. That’s a 60% residential broadband market share for cable, declining to 55% at the end of 2009.
Cable companies’ residential-telephone subscriber count is forecast at 9.1 million at the end of 2006, rising to 24.5 million at year-end 2009. The regional Bell operating companies are forecast to have 670,000 television customers by the end of this year, rising to 6.5 million at the end of 2009.
Convergence Consulting noted that the decline in basic-cable subscribers slowed in 2005 and will end up as a small amount of subscriber additions this year, reverting to minor losses in 2007.
Overall, 68.1 million residential cable TV subscribers are forecast at year’s end, compared with 29 million satellite-TV customers.
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