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Cable Expands Broadband Domination as AT&T and Verizon Lose Customers (arstechnica.com)
The cable industry's grip on the U.S. broadband space increased last quarter, with Comcast and Charter gaining nearly 500,000 subscribers, combined. Phone companies AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, and Frontier, however, all lost Internet customers. ArsTechnica reports:The 14 largest ISPs, accounting for 95 percent of the US market, gained 192,510 Internet customers in Q2 2016, bringing the total to 91.9 million, Leichtman Research Group reported today. Cable companies accounted for all of the gains, adding 553,293 subscribers for a new total of 57 million. The phone companies lost 360,783 subscribers, bringing them down to 34.9 million. Phone companies' losses more than doubled since Q2 2015, when they lost about 150,000 subscribers. [...] Comcast and Charter, the two biggest ISPs, led the way in subscriber gains. Comcast added 220,000 broadband subscribers to boost its total to 24 million, while Charter (the new owner of Time Warner Cable) added 277,000 subscribers for a new total of 21.8 million. AT&T lost 123,000 subscribers, lowering its total to 15.6 million. Verizon lost 83,000, leaving it with 7 million Internet customers. CenturyLink and Frontier lost 66,000 and 77,000, respectively.
of the pops!
I caught them red handed overbilling me. I set up my own usage meter to prove it.
Of course the companies that rely heavily on DSL lost customers to faster connections. DSL is today's dial up.
.
It's Information Highway robbery!
Were it not for the fact that CenturyLink is the only connectivity at my apartment complex (Cox services the neighboring subdivisions, so I'm not sure how that's even legal), I'd be jumping ship, too.
Yeah I can get better deal with DSL but they always have pricing for one year and then you have to renegotiate, or you have to sign up for a year of service.... I absolutely hate this kind of stuff. All account setup is automated anyway don't give me BS about a contract... the cable is just month to month so I stick with it.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Lack of investment in deploying DSL, the highest speeds I see advertised are "up-to" 40mbps. Meanwhile on cable my 150mbps package tests out to 170-180mbps every time I test it.
It *may* depend on the timeframe measured. I change between cable & Verizon dsl or fios depending on price. Once one gets too pricey (always do) at end of a year long contract I switch to the cheaper one(s) until they rise in price & I do it again.
* I'm sure this is done in waves by many people probably at the time I do it for the same reasons, money/cost - & this pattern of MINE? It's being reflected in the article above via the 2 ISP/BSP providers I do this with every year too.
(I say this since additionally & not TOO long ago, cable was losing people like mad... bet it's due to the above. They get them back that way too. Periodically).
APK
P.S.-> Am I alone here? Doubt it... apk
DSL has always been slower than cable, the only reason anybody ever thought otherwise is because the telcos spread FUD about cable being a shared medium. What they conveniently left out was the fact that the backbone is shared no matter what media is used, meanwhile DSL being on inferior voice grade copper has to use interleaving to prevent insane amounts of packet loss, which means retransmits that count against your rated speed with accompanying deliberate latency to compensate for jitter, in addition to the fact that they never heard of 802.1x, instead relying on PPP for authentication, which gave you about 15% layer 2 overhead that also counts against your rated speed.
call it what you will, i'd rather have slower if it was actually cheaper.... and in relation to speed, NOT just 5 bucks cheaper for 5mbit vs 30... which is a fucking sham.
when we signed up years ago, we signed up for 3mbit speed. that's all we needed then, it's still all we need today. yet we went from $29 for 3mbit to somehow paying $69 for 30 (but only getting 15) without ever changing or upgrading anything. and that's the cheapest thing they have. WE WANT OUR SLOWER, CHEAPER SPEED BACK, CHARTER. FUCK YOU. one size does NOT fit all, it only fits your bottom line.
I called AT&T to consider their DSL against my cable company's attempt to hike prices a little. Usually, the sales department of any organization is exceptionally strong. Not AT&T.
Me: I'd like to sign up for service.
AT&T Guy: [Babbles on about service area something or email accounts or the AT&T web site for 2 minutes. Nothing to do with price or signing me up.]
(After getting tired of the script reading which has nothing do with what I want ...)
Me: "Stop right there. AT&T has a price offered on the internet of [price]. If I can get that price, I sign up. Can I sign up for that price --- YES OR NO?"
AT&T Guy: "No."
Me: "Ok, thank you for your time."
How does AT&T stay in business? It's like a self-aware bureaucracy of red tape, even their sales department isn't sales oriented.
I was on Verizon Fios for 10 years ... They jacked my rate up to $83/month for internet only at 10/10mb ... They offer Triple play with 50/50 to new customers at $59.99, but they couldn't offer me jack because I'm not a new customer. Now I'm not their customer at all.
Now I've got Cox (cable) for $39.99 15/5 and I'm receiving offers from Verizon 2-3 times a week. Higher speeds available ... The base speed is fast enough for my needs.
If only Verizon 1) respected/valued their current / long-time customers i.e. tried to keep them ... (my wife and I BOTH get copies of their current offers 2-3 times a week!) Verizon is doing their part to keep the Post office funded ...
and 2) spent less money on sending out direct-mail offers
They'd keep their gravy train going ...
As it is, I'm now getting Internet service from the cable company for the duration of the contract, and when the cable company acts like a cable company (when the contract is done), I'll probably switch back ... or maybe another alternative will be available? We can only hope!
... relying on PPP for authentication, which gave you about 15% layer 2 overhead that also counts against your rated speed.
FWIW, not all DSL providers use PPPoE. At least not here in Canada.
The only reason I am off AT&T and on Time Warner is because AT&T capped their services as leverage to try to force you to subscribe to Direct TV or Uverse TV. (unlimited internet access if you subscribe to TV).
I didn't want to pay 30 dollars a month for an extra service that I won't use, so ironically I had to call up the TV provider, and subscribe to their internet only plan, for cheaper than AT&T.
They tried forcing their customers to pay for their dumb mistake of acquiring Direct TV, and it didn't work.
As much as I don't want to -- after almost 20 years of being on Verizon DSL, I'm going to have to switch to "xfinity".
I can only get ~3Mbit via DSL, due to my distance from the CO, combined with Verizon's aging equipment (circa 1992!) in my semi-rural location. There are people in all directions about 10 miles away from me that have FIOS as an option, which I'd gladly pay more for, but Verizon (in a surprise bit of candor) has told me that we'll "never get" FIOS at our location.
I can pay about the same for 20Mbit cable internet (or a lot more for 50Mbit) but then lose the dry copper pair that I've had forever and that's literally never gone down (we have virtually no cell service at home, so we have to have a landline). The DSL has been nearly 100% as well.
I've been putting off the switch for quite a while, since I'm nervous about being left with no comm at all when there's an (inevitable) outage, but eventually I'll have to bite the bullet and get "xfinity", since I simply don't have any other (affordable) options.
I've looked at voipo for VOIP, since comcast's overpriced "voice" option leaves a lot to be desired. I don't have and don't want premium cable TV. I'd happily pay (a reasonable sum) for local broadcast TV signals over clear QAM cable, since our OTA TV reception isn't great, but they won't sell it to me. I don't want their crappy cable box, when my TV has a perfectly good built-in tuner. Gets my goat, and is half the reason I haven't switched yet.
I wonder how many of those new comcast subscribers are internet-only? I'd guess many of them are verizon refugees in similar situations to myself.
Huh. I didn't even know that AT&T still sold residential internet service.
The phone companies aren't willing to hang the wires to Do Over their entire copper infrastructure.
They're going to hold out and wait for super wi-fi or whatever it is called.
I'm stuck on DSL, I simply haven't bothered to cut over to cable, which is my only other solution. When the real high speed wi fi comes out, the phone companies will bolt these things to every tower in their service.
Until then, they'll just offer bundle deals and wait it out.
In other news, pay TV subscriptions drop 665,000 in the second quarter, 2016
http://www.leichtmanresearch.c...
Maybe many those slow DSL and satellite video subscribers moved to cable companies to get the speed they need for streaming video entertainment.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
I had the same problem. AT&T refused to give me DSL on my AT&T copper line in CA because they had uverse and insisted on that or nothing. So I buy via a 3rd party provider, using AT&T's DSLAM and infrastucture, and actually pay less than AT&T would have charged me for DSL.
The root problem is that the ISPs in USA want to sell their non-ISP services, and price the services accordingly. E.G. Cable + internet is just a few dollars more than internet only.
Wow, wonder why I didn't even read the article.
Around here the cable company is losing customers hand over fist to the telco.
Those talking about how cable is a superior technology to DSL don't know what they're talking about. What makes either technology superior or inferior is the implementation, both technologies are capable of good solid high speeds if implemented right. Around here that means DSL is the way to go, the cable company advertises speeds they can't possibly provide due to oversubscribed nodes and lack of infrastructure upgrades, while the telco advertises the exact speeds that the customers actually get at their house as they've spent the past decade pouring tons of money in to infrastructure upgrades. Pricing is the same between the two companies, so why would you go for the one advertising more than they can provide when you could get what you paid for with the other? I've always found that to get the same speeds you need to purchase almost twice the package from the cable company that you need from the telco.
Add to that the fact that the telco is way ahead of the cable company in relation to rolling out fibre to the home/business and the cable company is really starting to be in a bit of a tough spot.
to fix corroded taps on the utility pole for 7 years in a row it's goodbye forever. That and the crappy DSL speeds, junk mail, and door to door salesmen that still come to my door even after telling them to stop.
I have DSL ( 12.3 Mbps down, 1.45 up ) with AT&T. I plan to leave them for NO INTERNET soon.
I may sign up with Comcast ( only other fast local alternative ) in a few months..... IF they honor their advertising.
Maybe not...
I started with AT&T in 2010 at $27/month, internet only. Price is now $64/month. They change terms on the contracts at will, without notification,
which probably is against contract laws. 800 lb gorilla.
So I am happy to see them decline. Not so happy about cable companies increasing, but someone has to...
And what are your alternatives?
Competitors offer only DSL? Cable has you by the nuts. And they love to squeeze. Good alternatives like FiOS? Comcast will resort to dumping pricing, essentially giving broadband away. But only if you order the cable TV package. Comcast is in the TV business, selling you to the premium programming providers. And doing their damnedest to drive any competition for TV content access out of the neighborhood.
Good luck figuring out cable pricing packages. Their offered package prices on the web vary by IP geolocation. And when they get your address for a new connection, if their offer isn't 'strategic' (i.e. undercutting the telco), you just never get scheduled for a hookup.
The only fix for this situation is to split the ISPs and cable companies into content or connectivity providers. Let each one price their service based upon their cost to provide service and let the customers buy only the pieces that they want. And regulate all broadband providers as common carriers so they have set and predictable rates for delivering any packets of the same size.
Ditto to this. I was content with Uverse, but with 4 rokus streaming I had to switch to Time Warner. The data caps were a retarded idea.
They were offering me 6Mbps DSL! Wow! My Charter service averages 11 times that for just a little more $$. I laughed as I threw the letter in the garbage.
A long time ago during the dial-up dark ages, I told the cable and phone companies that whoever got to my house first would get my business. Cable won that race by years, and I have no intention of ever changing.
I am a business #1, & some of my clientele live w/in the same property (1 of 2 dwelling places I own) I live in who also have to have phone lines (or DSL too)...
APK
P.S.=> See subject & believe it... apk
I was about to argue that 2-wire isn't ethernet, but if the layer 2 protocol is the same, it's irrelevant.
AT&T here is cheaper than Comcast for me. And the advantage that it's not Comcast.
This. Plus the fact that in many areas, especially urban ones. The infrastructure for telcos is shit. In my downtown, the cables running from the CO have at least 30% that are not good enough for DSL. The cost to gig up downtown to replace 1930s and 40s wiring is too great and left alone. Many more outlying areas have newer and better infrastructure, but long line lengths to the CO to deal with. DSL is lose lose all around, and the LECs will die from it.
Silence is a state of mime.
xDSL at a distance of more than say 3Km and it ain't broad band. The telcos have only themselves to blame for this. For decades they continued to milk and squeeze the American consumer and businesses with their services that were built using government funds and support and their lobbied for monopolies. 25 years ago when the cable companies started to get serious about providing internet service on their trunks the fat and healthy telcos stood back and let it happen without a bit of a fight. They were so use to having their monopoly and way with the customers that they were drunk with profits and power. By the time they were awoken from their largess the cable companies were really and truly entrenched in the very same markets that the telcos had run rough shod over. The barn door being left open and the whole ranch having run out they did what any smart business does, they doubled down on their crappy and woefully out of date infrastructure and milked the customer even harder. Cable companies, laughing all the way to the bank, simply leveraged their installed cable backbones and offered more and better services. The cable companies were driving wooden stakes into the vampire telcos hearts from every direction. xDSL to the rescue! BUT, it ran on old lines that were in some cases over the age of the execs that were now bilking you and me. If you were lucky and close to the CO you might be able to get 7 or 8Mbps. Most of us were lucky to even be able to get xDSL at 1-1.5Mbps. Meanwhile the cable companies and their equipment suppliers invested heavily in their backbones and ran fiber to the neighborhood and the RT feeding the trunks, the last mile as it were. Now they were poised to deliver. All the while they are also able to take advantage of the laws the Telcos had managed to slip into the law books, and by extension the public's ass, making it illegal for municipalities to build out a backbone or last mile. This applied even in places where they had no economic interest or incentive to provide service due to low density of population and demand for high margin services. I am going to say it again. Repeal the laws blocking municipalities from building out backbones and feeding the last mile and take it back for the public. Make all the value added service providers route through the municipal CO and destroy their strangle hold on the public.
Stupid phone companies! They could had taken over too, but they decided to give up because it is too costly. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I had (past tense) Frontier DSL for over a decade. They did gradually increase speed from 2.1Mbps to 3.6Mbps, but this was still slow for video. The upload speed of 420K was also crippling with cloud backup and photo sharing(my first Backblaze backup took 6 weeks). I have two phone lines coming into my house, so I repeatedly asked them about bonded DSL to get a more usable speed. They were clueless. They'd said they'd provide me 2 un-bonded services at the price of 2 separate services, but had no plans whatsoever to improve their speeds. I switched to Time Warner, and generally have good service and speed, although in the early evening their Youtube connection saturates.
Consider there is no specially made internet infrastructure to the users door and this is all a retrofit. Of course the guy with the most copper in the cable is going to do the best. When there are more options, users will jump ship rapidly.. if only just to try them out. That is the problem with abusing your customer base for marginal profit increases. You do make a lot of money over a long period of time, but when a new technologies comes out you risk have a mass market exodus from your produt, even as you lower prices to keep users, they have labeled you a bad deal and will avoid your brand. Verizon and Comcast come to mind. Comcast because of TV cable price gouging and Verizon because they are the worst company ever. Comcast has always provided me with fast and reliable internet. Verizon has always tried to screw me on my phone bill every time I wasn't looking. Hundreds of dollars for text and data because ppl did not sign up in advance. Yeah.. I'll leave verizon and never look back as soon as local coverage allows. I'll pay more to not use Verizon in fact.
The only effective way to cancel is to go into one of their service centres, with any rented kit you have to return. Tell them you moving in with a friend that already has service, for a few months while you look for a new place. That's stops the can-we-transfer-your-account script.
FUD nothing. It was once true that in heavy usage areas DSL was much faster for that very reason.
Funnily, back in 1998, I had cable; I had a lot of lag playing Quake3, so I switched to DSL and actually got better results. Of course, that was almost 20 years ago. Cable evolved to blow the doors off DSL, and FIOS was not coming to my area, so I finally switched back to cable, recently. I'm much happier now. It's more money, but the connection is vastly speedier.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
DSL has always been slower than cable, the only reason anybody ever thought otherwise is because the telcos spread FUD about cable being a shared medium.
It was not FUD. 10-15 years ago it was a real problem for cable, especially for @Home which was pretty popular before they went bankrupt. DSL often WAS faster due to the build-out architecture of cable, and consumer demand was often underestimated, especially with no data caps. That problem has mostly been solved, so you don't hear about it much anymore.
What they conveniently left out was the fact that the backbone is shared no matter what media is used,
Of course the backbone was shared, but backbone was not the limiting factor in either Cable or DSL... back then. In cable's case, the local neighborhood network was the limiting factor. During prime time, the backbone would be underutilized, your local connection might be underutilized, yet your connection would be slow because you were sharing the bandwidth with some neighbor who had Napster or eDonkey or Limewire up 24/7.
meanwhile DSL being on inferior voice grade copper has to use interleaving to prevent insane amounts of packet loss, which means retransmits that count against your rated speed with accompanying deliberate latency to compensate for jitter, in addition to the fact that they never heard of 802.1x, instead relying on PPP for authentication, which gave you about 15% layer 2 overhead that also counts against your rated speed
I've had three DSL connections, one with a static IP from 2000 - 2008, one with a dynamic IP from 2008-2009, and one with a semi-dynamic IP from 2009-current. The only time I've ever had to use PPPoE was in the 2008-2009 era.
Funnily, back in 1998, I had cable; I had a lot of lag playing Quake3, so I switched to DSL and actually got better results. Of course, that was almost 20 years ago
It may even still be true now, but it was DEFINITELY true back in the late 90s and early 2000s that cable had the bandwidth advantage, and DSL had the latency advantage. My download bandwidth is still pretty bad on DSL by broadband standards, but I still get 18ms pings to my game servers.