Cable Providers Acquire More Subscribers – Report

Cable companies, such as Comcast and Charter, have been showing great promise since the second quarter. It is reported that the cable providers were capable of attracting approximately 500,000 subscribers collectively, where on the other hand, phone companies such as CenturyLink, Frontier, AT&T, and Verizon experienced an elevated loss of internet subscribers.

According to the reports from Leichtman Research Group, the internet service providers acquired approximately 200,000 internet subscribers during the second quarter of 2016. Fourteen of these internet service providers currently have 91.9 million subscribers in the US.

Cable companies were also able to increase the number of customers to 57 million. However, phone companies lost approximately 360,783 customers during the second quarter, which reduced the number of the subscribers to 34.9 million. It is also to be noted that phone companies lost approximately 150,000 subscribers in the same period last year.

In a press release, Bruce Leichtman, the president of the research group said that, “Over the past year, cable companies have added about 3.5 million broadband subscribers, while telcos have had net losses of about 500,000 broadband subscribers.”

Comcast and Charter are the two internet providers who were able to succeed during the second quarter. Comcast added approximately 220,000 new subscribers and boosted the number of their subscribers count to 24 million. On the other hand, Charter was able to pose a great competition to Comcast in the second quarter, and they acquired 277,000 new subscribers to take their overall subscribers count to 21.8 million.

AT&T, one of the major satellite providers in the US, suffered an enormous loss of 123,000 subscribers that lowered their total subscribership to 15.6 million. Verizon also suffered a loss of 83,000 subscribers during the second quarter, which lowered the number of their internet subscribers to 7 million.

CenturyLink and Frontier are the other major internet providers who suffered customer loss during the second quarter. The loss of subscribers reduced the overall number of subscribers of CentruryLink to 6 million, and that of Frontier went down to 4.6 million.

Bruce Leichtman also commented that the broadband addition in second quarter “were less than in any quarter in the past fifteen years.” Even though the phone companies were able to add new customers in the modern fiber networks, they failed to maintain the number of subscribers in the copper-based DSL ones.

Analysts suggest that the main reason for the customer loss is the reluctance of these companies to invest more in the less profitable areas of business.