There’s a lot to chew over in the Federal Communications Commission’s latest report on broadband subscribers in the U.S. Just one of the many charts (pictured above) tells an interesting story about how people in the U.S. get fixed broadband service in their homes. Two conclusions jump out immediately: cable companies are winning the fight for broadband market share, but the availability of cable modem, fiber to the premise or other wireline service depends population density.
In other words, high density urban areas, and medium to high density suburbs are likelier to have high speed service via direct fiber or coaxial cable service, while people in rural areas are likelier to have to depend on fixed wireless or satellite providers.
DSL service, of whatever generation of technology, is fading into irrelevance. It is significantly less popular than cable modem service. Nationally, 62% of all fixed residential broadband service (defined as better than 200 Kbps in at least one direction) is delivered via cable modem, while telco style DSL accounts for 24%, and FTTP for 12%. But when usable service levels are examined, telco DSL craters, accounting for 13% of connections at 10 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload speeds or better, and only 4% at speeds of at least 25 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up. The former is the FCC’s minimum for its $3 billion broadband subsidy program – the Connect America Fund – while the latter is the FCC’s and federal agriculture department’s minimum benchmark for what they call “advanced services” and what everyone else considers to be run of the mill Internet use in 2018.
The overall trend in California is the same, according to the study, which is based on reports filed by service providers as of 30 June 2017. It doesn’t break out residential and business connections, but market share figures for total connections tell a similar story: cable accounts for 64% of all broadband connections, telco DSL is at 28%, FTTP is at 8% and fixed wireless has about 1%.