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After a Shaky 2008, U.S. Broadband Growth Picks Up
Nearly 1.6 million new Net users signed up for broadband from top 10 providers in the U.S. during the first quarter of 2009. That is about 600,000 more than 1.01 million net additions in the fourth quarter of 2008, reports Bruce Leichtman’s research company, Leichtman Research. In comparison, we had 2.2 million additions during the first quarter of 2008, followed by 887,000 new users in the second quarter of 2008 and 1.3 million in the third quarter. 2008 was the first year we saw some serious slowdown in broadband growth. According to Pike & Fisher, a research firm, broadband growth will decline 12 percent in the U.S. but subscriptions will rise about 8 percent.
Some Q1 2009 Broadband Facts
- Total Broadband Subscribers: 69.27 million
- Top phone companies have 31.52 subscribers, while cable companies have 37.76 million
- Top cable companies added over 835,000 subscribers, representing 52% of the net broadband additions
- AT&T has 15.44 million broadband subscribers, while Comcast has 15.26 million
- During the quarter, AT&T added 359,000 subscribers, while Comcast added 329,000. Time Warner, the second-largest cable company added 225,000 subscribers, while second ranked phone company Verizon added 252,000.
The underlying question remains: what type of speed are customers getting? With video applications taking off like a rocket, HD channels needing at least 10 megabits each, petabyte storage aka “Cloud Computing” — I think it’s less about penetration today and more about robustness/speed. I could be wrong.
Anyone catch Australia’s announcement a few weeks back — they (Public/Private Partnership) are going to fiber 90% of the country in 5 years. Minimum bandwidth to every home and biz on the fiber into the premise is 100m megabits.
The 10% that can’t be cost effectively served by fiber – they will get satellite.
America is woefully behind other advanced countries relative to speed — we (USA) have feel good numbers on penetration but the economic engine requires gobs of bandwidth. Our minimum national standard should be 100 megabits — what is our penetration rate at 100 megabits? Answer: Embarrassing
Actually, MPEG-4 AVC can do HD very well at 8 Mb/s and tolerably at 6 Mb/s. But I quibble.