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Comcast Adds 200,000 VoIP Subscribers by End of 2005
By ROBERT LIU
TMCnet Wireless and Technology Columnist
Comcast disclosed on Monday that the nation’s largest cable operator added 202,000 VoIP subscribers by the end of 2005, bringing the total number of telephony customers (both circuit-switched and packet-switched) to 1.3 million subscribers, in line with previous expectations.
“This is what we hoped to do in year one. We did it,” said Chairman and CEO Brian Roberts, speaking at a Citigroup investors’ conference in Phoenix, Arizona.
Comcast expects its Comcast Digital Voice product to capture one million new customers in 2006, Roberts said. If successful, “we’ll be over two million phone customers by 2006,” he told financial analysts and investors.
Roberts acknowledged the company still needs to migrate a substantial portion of its circuit-switched customers over to the Comcast Digital Voice service, which was launched in November 2005 in 21 markets. Analysts believe Comcast’s voice strategy could prove to be very lucrative.
“We believe voice will be one of the key catalysts for 2006 as it (1) redefines Comcast’s addressable markets by allowing it to target its non-video subs with a voice/data bundle and (2) helps drive video and data growth,” said Doug Mitchelson, analyst at Deutsche Bank.
To do this, however, Comcast will need to increase the availability of Comcast Digital Voice. It is now marketing its VoIP service to approximately 16 million homes. But, that means as much as 60 percent of its footprint (or roughly 20 million homes) still lack the technical capabilities to take advantage of the VoIP service.
Roberts said the company continues to expand availability of the service in markets like San Francisco, Washington, Nashville and Little Rock. Comcast hopes to have the service available in 70 million homes over the course of its five-year plan and capture a penetration rate as high as 20 percent. At last check, Comcast’s VoIP penetration rate stood only at 3 percent, well below industry leader Cablevision Systems with its Optimum Voice service and even below the overall industry average of 4 percent, according to Deutsche Bank research.
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Robert Liu is Executive Editor at TMCnet. Previously, he was Executive Editor at Jupitermedia and has also written for CNN, A&E, Dow Jones and Bloomberg. For more articles, please visit Robert Liu's columnist page.
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