North American cable operators (including those from North of the border) are signing up nearly 11,000 voice (oIP) customers a day, and now have close to 4.7 million subscribers, according to a study by Cable Data News. The report says that the CableCos have signed up over a million customers in Q2 alone. Cox and Comcast have about 2.3 million older circuit switched customers, which means they will sooner or later end up on IP as well.
The data should not be a surprise given the continuing land line losses at phone companies. AT&T, for instance lost about 426,000 lines – 106,000 additional lines (mostly used for dial up and fax) and 320,000 primary lines, reflecting the reality of continued migration of phone line customers to wireless, and cable.
Regardless, the speed with which CableCos are snapping up phone customers shows that the phone companies are under extreme pressure to roll out their triple play offerings.
This telco vs. cableco residential line stats war is misleading. You really need to add back in the mobile lines the bellcos add in their mobile divisions. If the bellcos convert residential lines to mobile lines, that is long term a net win. And the cablecos can’t touch that.
The number of VoIP subscribers rose by 83% during 2005, from 10.3 million at the beginning of 2005 to over 18.7 million subscribers worldwide by the end of the year, according to Point Topic report. Retail VoIP numbers more than doubled in the USA and Canada during 2005. (http://www.metrics2.com)
Also, given it’s basically the same POTS product being delivered in a new way, is it really big news? Now if a cableco opened up their telephony platform to 3rd party apps and features it’d be news. Will anyone give the users the better telephony experience they deserve, or is public telephony a Groundhog Day experience forever?
VOIP is the way to go. I dumped my landline for VOIP and it works like a charm
Sid
Martin Geddes: Now if a cableco opened up their telephony platform to 3rd party apps and features it’d be news.
Cable companies provide telephone service on top of IP network which is already open to 3rd-party applications. Besides, thy are using standard protocols (chiefly, SIP) that support variety of client applications.
The main limiting factor is actually the need to interface to PSTN, as well as the need to have telephone number, which is not mobile between the operators.
It’s a sad day when all of the innovation and hard efforts of a few visionaries in the VoIP arena has resulted in a feature-for-feature duplication by CableCos, rather than a revolution.
Say what you will about Vonage (they deserve their knocks) but at least they’re adding features and capabilities which don’t exist with ANY other solutions. They have to… it’s their only means of differentiation.
Even though the capability exists in the software that the CableCos have licensed for their services, they still can’t or won’t forward a voice mail to me via email.
… and access providers wonder why we never turn to them for cool products and services, and would rather deal with mashups / startups?
-Ian.
Cablecos may be using standard protocols (after all they own a standards body – Cable Labs), but I don’t think it is based on SIP. In any event, use of SIP does not mean third parties can develop call associated applications.
Having said that, I take issue with Martin in that, if there is really a market for third party applications, why don’t they offer it directly to the end customers and run it on the ATA (if it is allowed) or behind it?
Do describe the cable telephony services as VoIP as though it is related to Vonage or Skype-like services is to be very misleading. Cable telephony (based on the PacketCable standard, which does not currently use SIP, but may in the future) is essentially using IP as a transport proptocol to deliver traditional PSTN services. In fact, Cox has a large number of circuit-swithed customers who see nothing different than the packet-switched customers do.
It is not an Internet-based service. It is just as closed and tightly controlled as traditional RBOC wireline services. Given the base of IP (and the use of softswitches), there is opportunity to evolve the cable services into something more, but they aren’t now.
The correct number to track is how cable telephony is evolving (circuit plus packet) and to look at it separately from the Internet-based telephony services, such as Vonage, and the VoIM services (Skype et al.)
CABLE Companies combined have over 120,000 UNIFORMED Truck Service Techs making 8 house calls per day gives you almost a MILLION SERVICE CALLS/Sales potential per DAY to get RBOC lines onto CABLE VOIP…simple WIN WIN for the CABLES and a TOTAL LOSS for the RBOC’s…wait till the CABLES start offerring CELL 4 Play…
skibare