The Cable Industry Is Off to a Strong Start
It’s that time of the year: Performance reports are starting to trickle in from the cable and telephone industries.
Here is some good news for cable operators: The cable industry stands to collect significant gains in wireline broadband market share from 1Q17.
According to FierceCable, Comcast added 438,000 high-speed Internet users during 1Q17. Meanwhile, Charter Communications was close behind at 428,000 additions.
Unfortunately for competing telephone providers, the results were a bit different.
Frontier Communications, for instance, lost 102,000 broadband customers last quarter. AT&T, meanwhile, added just 115,000 subscribers and Verizon FiOS added only 35,000.
Cable operators should be very pleased with these figures, especially when considering the strong year that the industry had in 2016. As FierceCable pointed out, cable operators collected about 3.3 million high-speed Internet subscribers during 2016. Phone companies, meanwhile lost about 600,000 subscribers last year.
The big winners in cable from 2016 were Comcast, which added 24.7 million HIS subscribers and 1.4 million Internet customers last year. Charter Communications, for that matter, added over 1.6 million broadband users.
Cable companies, it should also be noted, brought in 122 percent of broadband gains last year — an increase of 18 percent year over year from 2015. And in 2014, cable brought in just 84 percent. So things are moving in the right direction here.
Granted, it’s only the beginning of the year and so these figures are liable to go in any direction. But for now, this is a cause for celebration.
How do you see the rest of the year playing out in the cable industry?