U.S. Telcos Halt Broadband Account Erosion

It might not seem like much that the biggest U.S. telcos added 50,000 net new internet access accounts in the second quarter of 2021. Not when the biggest cable companies added 840,000 net accounts in the same period. 

But the telco performance is important as it halts a 20-year period when cable dominated internet access growth. For most of the last two decades, telcos had either lost accounts overall or lost market share to cable operators. 

So far this year, telcos have had positive net net additions. 

Still, with cable companies adding new customers an order of magnitude faster than telcos, there is a long ways to go before telcos can hope to reverse the installed base trend, which has cable with about a 70 percent share, compared to about 30 percent share for telcos.