Broadband Hits Maturity: Implications of a Slower-Growing Market

IP Media Monitor has performed a detailed analysis that looks at broadband trends in the US. It looks at land-based telco internets.

Broadband Hits Maturity: Implications of a Slower-Growing Market

2007 Could Be the First Year of U.S. Broadband Growth Slow-Down, According to Analysis by Emerging Media Dynamics.

Top Broadband Providers Experienced 22% Seasonally Adjusted Drop in Broadband Customer Gains During Q2 07, Potentially Signaling Long-Anticipated Era of Decelerating Broadband Growth, Research Firm Says

U.S. broadband growth declined on a seasonally adjusted quarterly basis during Q2 07, the first such true growth deceleration since broadband Internet service emerged from its tentative test-bed status in 1997. According to our just-completed analysis of the broadband marketplace, the top four telco and top nine cable broadband service providers experienced combined net high-speed Internet customer additions of 1.56 million during Q2 07, a rate of growth that was 22% lower than the 1.994 million net additions the same group of companies gained during Q2 06.



Our exclusive analysis of this critical turning point in the broadband world is spelled out in our report, Broadband Hits Maturity: Implications of a Slower-Growing Market. Everyone has long understood that fundamental mathematics would result in a slow-down of broadband growth sooner or later. But, as Broadband Hits Maturity notes, the U.S. experienced accelerating quarterly and annual gains in the high-speed Internet business for almost ten years, and the Q2 07 downshift in growth is nonetheless as surprising as it was predictable.

This data-rich report offers detailed charts, tables and analysis that interpret this development and deliver cogent assessments of the competitive performance of the major cable and telco service providers in the U.S. Among the companies examined in the report are:

Brighthouse Networks
Cable One
Cablevision
Charter
Comcast
Cox
Insight
Mediacom
Time Warner
Qwest
AT&T
Verizon
Embarq

More importantly, Broadband Hits Maturity offers reasoned and reasonable industry-wide projections on just how quickly -- or how slowly -- the U.S. broadband market will grow over the next ten years. According to our analysis, by year-end 2017, at least 100 million homes will subscribe to some form of broadband service, which represents still-healthy growth in this business. At the same time, however, could grow and should grow at a far slower pace than they have over the past ten years.



The year 2006 may very well have been the high-water mark in residential broadband growth, with all providers adding an incremental 10.6 million units during the year. For 2007, however, the net growth in residential broadband subscriptions could slip to 8.8 million, declining each thereafter until hitting 1.5 million for the year 2017. The upshot of this cool-down could be greater price competition across the range of triple-play (and even quadruple-play) services in selected markets, plus intensified efforts by broadband providers to differentiate their services in terms of speeds, reliability and even content-related add-ons.


The detailed report is for sale via the link at the top of the article.


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My take on this is that this may be the trend if viewed a certain way at today's environment. As I've said before, people are using more bandwidth-intensive applications such as music, YouTube-type apps, VOIP, and others. And chances are that the number of users will increase rather than decrease. Needless to say, the rest of the world's broadband usage will increase significantly, and as I said before, the implications of this report are specific to the US due to the telco industry's monopoly control which erases competition in the marketplace.

Again, the telcos, internet providers, and their business models are the problem.