Do Cable Customers Get Better Broadband than Telecoms Subscribers?: [3rd Mar 2011]

Research from the Leichtman Research group has shown that cable companies in the US are offering their customers a better broadband speed than their telecoms competitors and that they also control more of the market. The top cable companies gained 68% of those who entered the broadband market last year with 2.3 million new subscribers compared to 1.1 million in the phone sector. It has been suggested that the triple play feature of cable has been a factor. This bundle of digital voice, TV and broadband has been luring more customers added to the increased speeds available. It has also been suggested that many phone providers are not willing to invest in fiber to improve their speeds; giving cable more chance to get into the market. The results did point out that there is still a high level of broadband penetration with 83% as many subscribers in 2010 as there were in 2009.


Blair Levin, the man behind the FCC broadband plan released last year has spoken out on some of its shortcomings but has still failed to acknowledge that the lack of competition in the sector is the main reason why the broadband plan may not work. He made some comments this week which suggested that the Lifeline and Linkup schemes should be replaced with schemes which encourage people to improve their computer skills. These two schemes help people to pay for phone services but do little to encourage the use of the Internet. Experts have however pointed out that well meaning schemes will not fix the problem of the lack of competition which is at the root of high prices and a lack of access.


Ralph de la Vega from AT&T has commented this week that they have not lost many customers to Verizon after the latter started offering the iPhone and that those which have been lost are within their expectations. AT&T have insisted that there would be little movement due to the numbers of people who are still locked into family and business contracts. In addition the company has a $325 ETF which was raised last year just in time for this eventuality. Experts have questioned how this could be considering the fact that AT&T are usually last in customer satisfaction ratings and suffer with congestion issues. It is thought that more people will switch when their contracts run out during the following year.


Meanwhile Verizon have claimed that they have sold more iPhones than expected having reached the one million mark. Dan Mead from Verizon told media this week that 60% of the orders were sold before the main release. It is also thought that many people may be waiting for the iPhone 5 which is due out this summer. However it is not until the iPhone 6 that consumers will be able to enjoy the benefits of 4th generation wireless technology with the LTE version.


Google has experienced four days of Gmail problems this week and has been working to restore emails and logins for their customers. The outages began on Sunday with world wide accounts being affected. Some customers lost all of their emails while others lost older messages only. Others could not log into their accounts. Google have said that the service suffered from a bug in their software storage.


A recent study conducted by Rockwool Foundation Research Unit has shown that 70% of those questioned thought that downloading illegal content from the Internet is acceptable, but 75% of those felt that it was unacceptable to go on to sell that content for profit. The Danish study also showed that 15-20% felt that piracy was totally acceptable on the sliding scale of responses and 30% felt it was completely unacceptable - at the other end of the scale. It seems that anti-piracy campaigns have done little to change views as the results from a similar study conducted in 1997 had very similar results.