Pike & Fischer: Broadband subscriber signup slump coming in 2010

Consumers may be unwilling to part with their broadband connection, but you'll be hard pressed to find a surge of new subscribers in 2010. According to a new report from Pike & Fischer, only about four million additional U.S. households will adopt broadband this year, a 10 percent drop over 2009.      

In its new report Broadband Competition Outlook 2010, P&F reveals that the total number of broadband-connected homes will surpass the 77 million mark by the end of 2010, representing approximately 65 percent of U.S. households. And while both cable MSOs and telcos will continue to see "stunted" growth of their respective broadband empires, P&F said that telcos will bear the brunt of the decline as they will continue to see customers defect to cable.

A key point that continues to set cable and DSL apart is speed. Although AT&T [1] and Verizon [2] are making progress in expanding the availability of their fiber-based broadband services, the majority of their service areas continue to be dominated by slower speed DSL. In the near-term, consumers are ditching DSL to get faster speed broadband service from the cable operator. As a result, P&F forecasts that while neither telcos nor cable MSOs will see a dramatic increase in subscribers, telcos will only add about 1.7 million new subscribers this year, while cable will bring on 2.1 million new subscribers.

For more:
- see the release here [3]