bkinn

Cable is Cornering the Broadband Market

Talk about being blinded by statistics. Cable posts high gains in broadband sign ups and you seek to bolt to the conclusion that Cable wins and VZ/T loses. I've been watching this contest for many years and I don't think anyone has been able to call a winner definitely. There have been times where it looked as though cable was going to pull out ahead, but there have been times when the opposite held true. Telecom/network engineers have held long ended debates about the strengths and weaknesses of each contender ... the variables are extensive and are only getting more numerous, industry leaders puzzle over who will own the "master pipe" in the end ..., yet you in your wisdom have concluded that cable will now step forth a winner; simply because they managed to sign up a large number of broadband users in a quarter.

I suppose you missed the fact that most of those new sign ups came from current cable users. In fact, Comcast had a reduction in new users this last quarter. VZ and T had higher numbers in new user sign ups for video. Cable is likely to enjoy a period of migration to broadband as long as they still hold the most overall customers for video. Naturally we should expect them to sign up existing customers to broadband since most of those customers don't even have access to dsl let along FiOS or U-Verse. I have cable, but if I could get FiOS .. I would switch in a minute. In fact, I would switch to dsl in a second as well because it is a superior service (cable has distributed bandwidth speeds, I never recieve the bandwidth that was advertised). As more and more video is distributed via on-net, people will begin the see the necessity of 'sustained rates' of bandwidth and cable will either need to upgrade their infrastructure, or sit by and watch as telecom carriers begin to erode their customer base in similair fashion to the way wireless and VoIP are eroding traditional POTS lines.