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.

Comments

Re: DSL shouldn't be considered broadband any more

[ArmoredDragon]

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.

How does AT&T not go broke?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:DSL shouldn't be considered broadband any more.

[MBGMorden]

It's not optimal but really it ain't terrible either. I have 50Mbps cable at my house, but I go over to my parents at least every other weekend and they live further out - 3Mbps DSL is the best available in their area (I'm surprised they even have that available).

Honestly - if I were to download a file, it obviously goes a lot slower, but as far as just browsing the web and even watching Youtube videos on their Roku: The difference isn't even noticeable vs my connection at home.

Whether you want to call it "broadband" or not, DSL is still a perfectly functional and usable Internet connection (unlike dial-up where just browsing the web is slow to the point of being unusable).