Now that all the Q1 07 earnings reports have been issued, it’s time once again to take a look at the U.S. cable industry’s success rate in capturing telephony subscribers with their still-relatively new digital voice services. According to our tally, at the end of Q1 07, the top U.S. cable companies served 9.82 million telephony customers, representing 9.6% of the 102.5 million homes passed by telephony-capable plant (note that not all of these homes passed were actively marketed by the operators.)
Growth in cable’s telephony customer count is gaining speed too. During Q1 07, the top operators combined added 1.14 million net new customers, a run rate 78% higher than the 644,553 net new telephony customers added during the year-ago quarter and 13% higher than the 1.01 million net new telephony customers added during Q4 06.
Not surprisingly, Comcast posted the highest number of net new customer gains year-over-year, adding 1.6 net new telephony customers year-over-year. The numbers for the top operator, which undertook a big VoIP deployment push in 2006, would have been even higher if Comcast weren’t actively trying to shrink its legacy voice customer count.
Mid-sized operator Charter Communications, however, posted the biggest percentage gain year-over-year. From Q1 06 to Q1 07, Charter’s telephony customer count jumped from 191,100 to 572,600, a 200% increase.
| Cable Telephony Subscriber Counts (in mil., except $) | |||||
| 1Q06 | 2Q06 | 3Q06 | 4Q06 | 1Q07 | |
| Brighthouse Networks* | 0.25 | 0.33 | 0.37 | 0.41 | 0.47 |
| CableOne | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.01 |
| Comcast** | 1.42 | 1.71 | 2.09 | 2.51 | 2.99 |
| Cox* | 1.73 | 1.82 | 1.91 | 2.01 | 2.10 |
| Cablevision*** | 0.87 | 0.99 | 1.11 | 1.21 | 1.32 |
| Charter | 0.19 | 0.26 | 0.34 | 0.45 | 0.57 |
| Insight | 0.10 | 0.11 | 0.11 | 0.12 | 0.15 |
| Mediacom | 0.05 | 0.07 | 0.08 | 0.11 | 0.12 |
| Time Warner***** | 1.25 | 1.46 | 1.65 | 1.86 | 2.09 |
| Total | 5.85 | 6.74 | 7.66 | 8.67 | 9.82 |
| Quarterly Adds. | 0.64 | 0.89 | 0.92 | 1.01 | 1.14 |
| Total Telephony HP by Group | 79.16 | 88.55 | 93.90 | 98.17 | 102.53 |
| Subs. % of Telephony HP | 7.4% | 7.6% | 8.2% | 8.8% | 9.6% |
| *EMDI estimates. Note Cox offers a mixed of circuit-switched and VoIP service. | |||||
| **At end of Q1 07, Comcast passed 34.8 million homes with VoIP service and counted 2.43 million VoIP or digital voice customers. The remaining homes passed and subscribers reflected legacy circuit-switched. | |||||
| ***Includes sequentially decreasing, and increasingly trivial, amounts of legacy circuit-switched customers. | |||||
| *****Does not include trivial number of circuit-switched voice subscribers. EMDI estimates for telephony homes passed. | |||||
| Source: Company reports and Emerging Media Analysis estimates. © 2007. | |||||
(Reprinted from today’s issue of IP Media Monitor.)
Cynthia Brumfield at 5:08 PM|Comments(0)
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