Friday, July 22, 2016

Broadband Now (Blog # 3820)

“The industry's seventeen biggest broadband providers added 1.1 million net additional high-speed Internet subscribers during the first quarter of 2016 -- and the vast majority of them went to cable providers. According to the latest data by Leichtman Research, the top cable companies added about 1,065,000 broadband subscribers in the quarter, or 99% of the net additions seen by the industry. In contrast, the top phone companies added just 10,000 net broadband subscribers for the quarter, thanks to the continued (and quite intentional) loss of DSL users.” [source: DSLR]

A short blog post about broadband with links to articles about price, an FCC report and what cable is doing and why.

What has Google Fiber been up to? Opening new markets in a serious looking way. They even launched Google Fiber for Business. This probably has to do with the abysmal number of paid subscribers that they have (estimated by many sources to be around 155K). TV subscriptions are around 60K homes for Google Fiber. That is an expensive venture for so few homes.

Google added voice to residential fiber probably to be have it available to offer business voice. Google also partnered with RingCentral on Google for Work for Enterprise. That will fail. RC has partnered with many ILECs - ATT, BT, BellCan, Telus - to no avail.

It's Surprisingly Inexpensive For Google To Build Its Cable-Destroying Google Fiber Network.

4 factors for selling Broadband.

COPPER!

CenturyLink is retiring copper just like the other IXCs (Ma and Pa Bell). It is weird because DSL, landlines, EoC all require copper.

Frontier doubles down on copper. So does Windstream, which is pushing 100MB broadband instead of Gigabit. But even AT&T offers SMS to landline.

Fairpoint is telling their investors that no one buys Gigabit. (They are like WIND and don't have the money to spend building out rural fiber broadband. Yet CenturyLink’s data suggests that Gigabit may not be the first choice, but people will buy higher speeds if offered Gigabit. (They don’t want the slowest, but they don’t want the most expensive either).

And for the sales sheet to MDU: Fiber-based broadband raises MDU rental values by 8 percent, says FTTH Council.

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