On The Verge

I don’t know why, but I remain infuriated with analysts and members of the media that continue to point out irrelevant issues in the broadband segment. I promise to post on some of the other items stacking up on my desk soon, but here’s another analyst missing the point. I’m not sure how a report from Mercator Capital ended up in my inbox, but in their IP Communications Newsletter there is an article entitled “Cable -- Winning the VOIP battle but losing the video war.” Actually you can disregard the headline because the article is mostly about the saturation in the broadband subscriber segment. Early on the article does claim that cable companies are losing video subscribers, although it doesn’t cite the magnitude of the loss. But it primarily focuses on coming financial peril because the growth in broadband subscribers is stalling. How could this be a surprise? Neither the cable companies or telcos are really trying to reach people that they can’t already serve with their existing plants. They are certainly scrapping for customer that they both reach, and even offering improved services to those customers. But as I pointed out in “Broadband reach is still the issue despite congestion projections” and a recent column, the opportunity is in reaching new customers.