Page Impressions Ltd Blogcetera: ISP & Cable Numbers for the United States - February 2009

Tuesday, February 03, 2009

ISP & Cable Numbers for the United States - February 2009

Here are the updated numbers for the US ISP market and trying to get accurate figures for Internet access for DSL, Cable Access and Dial-up. I worked with OECD published data for Broadband adoption and I have gone through all the reports and disclosures for each of the ISPs shown below. I believe these figures represent a reasonably accurate representation of the genuine adoption of broadband either via DSL or Cable. Broadband connections included in this data cover download speeds equal to or faster than 256kbit/s.

Table 1 US ISP & Cable Operators









Name

ADSL

Cable

Dial

Total

AOL

2,400,000


5,100,000

7,500,000

United Online

1,500,000



1,500,000

Road Runner


8,600,000


8,600,000

Earthlink

575,000


1,725,000

2,300,000

Embarq

1,400,000



1,400,000

Cox


3,650,000


3,650,000

Comcast


14,700,000


14,700,000

Charter

2,900,000



2,900,000

Cablevision


2,400,000


2,400,000

Suddenlink Comm


1,400,000


1,400,000

Bright House Networks


2,200,000


2,200,000

AT&T World net/BellSouth/SBC

10,200,000

4,000,000

600,000

14,800,000

Insight Communications


420,000


420,000

Verizon

8,500,000



8,500,000

Qwest

2,800,000



2,800,000

Media com


730,000


730,000

Cincinnati Bell

230,000



230,000

Local Net


260,000


260,000

Wind stream


400,000


400,000

Others


1,200,000

30,000,000

30,000,000






Totals

30,505,000

32,230,000

37,425,000

100,000,000







Broadband Total

62,725,000





The reported numbers for AOL look a little suspect, but I feel the overall picture for DSL and Cable Access for each of the ISP or Cable Companies detailed in the Table is reasonable at this point in time.
The figure of 62,725,000 Broadband access either via DSL or Cable indicates approximately 0.7% growth over the figures published in October 2007 , which indicates that growth has largely stalled and the only way to grow will be through acquisition. 2009 will be a very tough year for ISPs and Cable companies as numbers users stagnate and it becomes increasingly challenging to hang on to users in a very competitive market. I am sure we will see the sort of offers last seen with the intense Fixed line Phone competition of the the mid 90s when it seemed to be possible to switch from deal to deal without paying anything for service relying on the free intro offers. We shall see! Without doubt some of the companies listed will not be in next years listing in any case. Several are heavily relient upon on-line ad spend and average PPC levels are falling across the board as companies re-evaluate their media spend in recessionery times. 2009/2010 is likely to be a as bad a period for ISPs since 2002.

Some notable changes in numbers with respect to Insight Communications which saw its subscriber numbers drop sharply as it dissolved a partnership with Comcast. One other major change has been the SBC/ATT numbers, which have changed massively mainly in dial-up.

Once again I have used public sources such as those published by ISP Planet and OECD published data as well as correlation with website information from individual ISP/Cable Companies.

One area that I have not been able to evaluate is the mobile dongle market in the US which is taking huge market share in the UK and across Europe. The growth in this area could account for the apparent sluggish growth in the main market. I will report back on this shortly.

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