Cable Telephony Tops the 13-Million MarkIP&Democracy

I pointed out yesterday that the telcos keep losing a weirdly steady number of landline voice customers each quarter, around 2.3 to 2.6 million traditional customers lost each quarter.

Around half of those defectors are now cable voice customers, and according to the latest Q4 07 tallies, cable's phone business now tops the 13 million mark. As the table below shows, at the end of Q4 07, the top cable companies served 13.3 million voice customers, mostly digital voice (as opposed to the still-in-existence circuit-switched cable voice service).

Cable Telephony Subscriber Counts   4Q06 4Q07 Brighthouse Networks*       412,050        503,852 CableOne          2,925          58,640 Comcast**    2,519,000      4,553,000 Cox***    2,023,000      2,380,000 Cablevision**    1,214,000      1,592,000 Charter       445,800        959,300 Insight****       118,200        186,200 Mediacom       105,000        185,000 Time Warner**    1,860,000      2,895,000 Total    8,699,975    13,312,992 Quarterly Adds.    1,029,320      1,184,094 Total Telephony Homes Passed by Group  97,891,360  109,664,048 Subs. % of Telephony Homes Passed 8.9% 12.1% *EMDI estimates.  **Includes sequentially decreasing, and increasingly trivial, amounts of legacy circuit-switched customers. ***EMDI estimates for Q307 ****Post-split with Comcast. Source:  Company reports and Emerging Media Analysis estimates.  © 2007.

Two-thirds of those customers come from three companies: Comcast, Time Warner and Cox. During the full year 2007, the cable group nearly a combined five million voice customers, with penetration rising from 8.9% to 12.1%.

It's hard to say that cable's growth on the telephony front has slowed down. One of the operators, Insight, just reconfigured itself on 12/31/07 by disbanding a partnership with Comcast and no good quarterly data are available for any quarters but for Q4 06 and Q4 07.

But cable's still got plenty of room to grow. At the end of 2007, cable telephony capable plant passed nearly 110 million U.S. homes, or around 96% of all U.S. homes.