IP Democracy: U.S. Cable Telephony Growth Strong in Q1 08

As the cable industry heads into its big annual trade show this weekend in New Orleans, it has one major unqualified success to tout. U.S. cable operators added a collective 1.3 million net new voice customers during Q1 08, a strong run rate that is slightly higher than the 1.2 million or so net new voice customers gained by the same group in Q4 07. (Due to system swaps, sales and other structural changes, we can't do a year-over-year comparison for net voice adds).

By quarter's end, the top nine U.S. operators served a total of 14.5 million voice customers, up about 57% year-over-year, representing about 13% of the homes capable of buying telephone service from cable companies. Just for a competitive comparison, the top telcos, cable's main rivals, served around 5.7 million multichannel video customers, and they too gained a lot of ground on enemy turf in Q1 08. So both major communications providers continued to make good headway into each other's businesses during the quarter.

Comcast, the biggest cable company, has the biggest slice of the cabletel business, accounting for 35% of the total. Time Warner, the number two cable company, has the second largest share (22%), with Cox (17%) and Cablevision Systems following behind.

Download our detailed spreadsheet (no charge but registration required) which spells out the subscriber counts and telephony-capable homes passed for all of the major operators.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on May 17, 2008 12:59 AM to IP Democracy