Cable TV stealing customers from telco TV in ‘bloody war’

| 13-12-2010

Competition in the mobile and fixed broadband market will have an enormous impact on all telco industry market players attempting to fend off cable TV firms, according to a characteristically robust analysis of what is creating competition in the mobile broadband industry by Strand Consult.

The Danish analyst says that around the world, there is no doubt that competition is tough in today’s broadband markets and that the bandwidth speed customers are being offered is growing more quickly than the customers’ needs, and at the same time mobile broadband prices are plummeting. For many companies in this business, Strand says, what is currently happening on the mobile broadband market can best be described as a bloody war.



Yet in this way cable TV firms seem to have the upper hand. Strand argues in its report, Successful Strategies for the Mobile Broadband Market, that cable TV providers have been very successful in many countries in upgrading their TV customers to triple play products and are generally seeing very low churn among their customers.

Moreover, suggests the analyst, cable TV companies are finding that their customers are not as price sensitive as many other broadband segments on the market and in practice they are most often stealing customers from the traditional DSL providers.

In what may be even more challenging for telcos, Strand believes that companies that purchase access to the raw copper and deliver their own DSL will likely experience that the price they are paying to rent the copper, will in some countries be more expensive than the cost of a low speed mobile broadband connection. This is said to be already the case in Denmark and Sweden.

Strand also asserts that companies offering broadband connections via fibre are having difficulty attracting enough customers to justify the infrastructure investments they have made over the years. The analyst concludes that many of these market players have no option but to include what it describes as “extraordinarily large” infrastructure depreciation in their accounts