A survey by In-Stat says that US and Canadian consumers believe that they cannot live without broadband. For someone who has been champion the speedy connections for a while, this does come as a great bit of news, though it does seem obvious.
According to the survey, nearly 72% of all leading-edge BB households in North America already have a cable service bundle. Don’t take that stat too seriously – leading edge – is bound to create confusion. We don’t know what it really means. Cable’s share of broadband market is around 57% in the US. Of course people have a “cable service bundle.” Try buying cable broadband without television package!
The survey also shows that that 85% of the broadband household segments favor the quadruple play.They favor it – of course, because who wouldn’t want a single bill, and single point of failure: I keep forgetting to send in the check all the time. However, in order for four-play to work, the solutions have to be simple and easy to use.
Despite all that, the fact that we are thinking about broadband as our most important communication service – that is good news.
shouldn’t it be “life” not “live” ?
i am tripping this morning. thanks for catching that. appreciate it and apologize again.
Love the trend, but it is doable to buy cable broadband without cable TV: I use Cox for Internet and phone, but Dish Network for television. In fact, it’s cheaper for me to do that (by $10-20/month, depending on the particular options one selects) that to get all three of those services bundled by Cox.
Om, You need more coffee this morning, we can get Comcast BB without Cable in SF. Especially useful if one lives too far from the node for good DSL service. Sadly it is too expensive but then monopolies can charge what they want…
great news for affluent income generators across all of north america, but gosh, not such great news for the other 100+ plus million people living in north america who could really give a shit about this kind of trend (as in, “of course services that start at 70 to 90 per month are important to me”)
on an interesting aside, the growth in wired schools has been outstanding – many towns and cities are past 80 to 90 percent, many at 100…however, most kids are going home to houses without broadband, without pc’s etc, and so in reality the proliferation of broadband is paramount in subsidized form (not the bundling you’re talking about) – a full suite of online software awaits users of broadband accessible outlets (community outlets, schools, libraries etc)…not just socialization, but productivity as well…and not just from elgoog, duhoy…
I think that non-video cable modem subscription should be seen as a growing trend. Unless you have a sweet TV set up or just simply prefer to pay a lot for cable, there are many IP TV options on the cusp.
TVanywhere.org, TVUNetworks.com, get a Slingbox put it at your parents’ place … and so on.
You really dont need to pay $30 for basic or $50-$60 for digital cable when you only watch a few select channels. Using the web for a la carte TV is only going to get easier. Wont take over, but it’ll make in roads for “leading edge” households.
With that said, broadband is extremely important, broadcast TV is not.
I think Scott Adams agrees with you.
at least in SF Bay Area it makes no sense to buy cable broadband without TV. Comcast charges $13 more for broadband without TV AND slows it to 3 mbps. if you take Comcast’s bare minimum TV ($14.95 – they don’t advertise it – 30 channels of crap), you qualify for the bundled broadband price and more importantly also get bumped up to 6 mbps. So I took this package and also got dish network for my real TV.
I started with cable broadband when my employer was paying for it. I stopped working there 6 months ago but haven’t even considered getting rid of my broadband.