Comcast now has more than half of all US broadband customers
Comcast’s broadband market share just got a huge bump.
Yesterday, the FCC decided to raise minimum broadband speeds from 4Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream to 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream, over the objections of the cable industry, which has argued that it faces serious competition from DSL.
Comcast, the nation's largest Internet service provider, dominates the country at the higher speeds, in large part because today's DSL networks can't keep pace with cable. According to the company’s filings with the Federal Communications Commission, Comcast has more than half of all the customers in the United States with home Internet connections of at least 25Mbps.
Comcast detailed the numbers in a December 2014 filing on its proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable. The filing discusses the company’s pre- and post-merger market shares at various Internet speeds. (The Wall Street Journal had a story on the filing yesterday.)
Under the 25Mbps threshold, Comcast will have "56.8 percent [market share] excluding mobile broadband and 44.7 percent including mobile broadband” after the merger, the filing says. But that is barely changed from today because “less than one tenth of TWC customers enjoy speeds at or above 25 Mbps, whereas more than half of Comcast customers enjoy such speeds.”
“Comcast’s national share [will] only increase[e] by one percent due to the transaction under this definition of broadband,” Comcast said. These figures include all 25Mbps and higher downstream connections regardless of upstream speed because of data limitations.
Comcast’s share is smaller under the lower definitions of broadband, the speeds that DSL can provide. At 3Mbps down and 768Kbps up, the post-merger Comcast would have 37 percent of the national market excluding mobile broadband and 13.7 percent including mobile broadband. At 10Mbps downstream (with no upstream restrictions), the post-merger Comcast would have 42.1 percent excluding mobile broadband and 22.2 percent including mobile broadband. This is “an increase of approximately 12 percent and 7 percent, respectively,” Comcast wrote.
The data Comcast uses comes from an FCC report relying on data from December 2013, so things might have changed a bit since then.
According to Comcast, these numbers show that the FCC should approve its purchase of Time Warner Cable. “[T]he salient fact is that even at the most extreme speed threshold of 25Mbps, the Transaction has no material impact on competition: The combined company’s broadband share would increase by only 1 percent,” Comcast wrote. Comcast argues that critics of its merger are "ignor[ing] the realities of DSL and mobile wireless competition."
As for pay TV service, Comcast says it will have less than 30 percent of the national market after the merger. Comcast and Time Warner Cable are the two largest cable companies in the US.
