Baby Bells Match Cable in Q1 Broadband Gains

Starting off 2006 with another rousing performance, cable operators and phone companies scored record quarterly gains in broadband subscribers during Q1, boosting the total number of residential high-speed data customers to nearly 44 million in the U.S. and over 50 million including Canada.

With both industries going full steam, North American broadband providers collectively added 2.97 million high-speed data customers in Q1, according to the latest research compiled by Cable Digital News. This total breaks the old quarterly record of 2.84 million just set by the cable and phone industries in the final quarter of 2005. It also nudges the continent's residential broadband penetration rate over the 43% mark and the U.S. broadband penetration rate over the 41% mark.

In an interesting twist this time, cable modem and DSL providers split the broadband customer gains just about neatly in half, with the phone companies enjoying a very slight 22,000-customer edge in the U.S. and the cable companies enjoying an almost equally slight 28,000-subscriber advantage in Canada. With the two countries' broadband totals combined, cable operators ended up edging out the telcos by a scant 6,000 subscribers overall.

Thanks in large part to the growing deployment of their new voice-over-IP (VoIP) products and even newer "triple-play" bundles, U.S. and Canadian MSOs produced unusually strong broadband gains during the winter months. Cable operators netted nearly 1.49 million cable modem subscribers, up markedly from 1.30 million customers in the fall and 1.1 million in the year-ago period.

But U.S. and Canadian DSL providers, who have been outpacing their cable rivals for most of the past two years, pretty much matched the strong MSO subscriber increases. The phone companies signed up 1.48 million residential high-speed data subscribers in Q1, just a bit off their record haul of 1.53 million new customers in the


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