2008 Year in Review: Cable companies win, phone companies lose

Cable companies have plundered phone companies' landline sales with lower prices and triple-play bundles, a trick landline providers hope to ultimately turn back around using TV - but we digress.  

Landline sales continue to decrease quarter after quarter, and the only thing more embarrassing than the continued losses is the failure of traditional landline powers to 'fess up to the reality of the situation and spell out how they're going to do more than simply flog the dead horse of "stemming losses" and "retaining existing customers." 

Comcast led off 2008, with the cable company staking its claim to the title of fourth-largest phone service provider in the U.S. with 4.1 million phone customers (guess they weren't factoring cellular companies into the mix). At the end of the third quarter, Comcast had reached 6.1 million homes with a take rate of around 13 percent - so there's still room to grow. Given monthly average revenue of around $39 a subscriber and lip-smacking income of $1.9 billion year-to-date, there's a lot to like. 

Looking at other the other top cablecos, Time Warner logged 3.6 million residential phone subscribers (3Q08), Cablevision logged 1.8 million (3Q08), and Charter got 1.2 million (3Q08). Cox may have more than 2.5 million subscribers, but they haven't published updated numbers in a while (since around May 2008, it appears), and it has a mix of VoIP and non-VoIP technologies across its service areas. 

Meanwhile, AT&T and Verizon continue to bleed landline losses, both to cable VoIP and their own wireless divisions. Verizon lost 1.19 million landline subscribers just in 3Q08. Tighter consumer budgets also will likely accelerate landline losses to cable triple play offerings.

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