I hope broadband competition in the New York City area is the wave of the future. The region, which is densely populated, has three Internet service providers vying for customers. And since Time Warner Cable announced yesterday that it will deploy DOCSIS 3.0 to the city, the area also will soon have competing super-fast broadband offerings from all three providers. Verizon touts its FiOS service there, and Cablevision already offers DOCSIS 3.0 and just launched speeds of 101 Mbps to Long Island residents.
A lot has been written about the merits of Verizon’s fiber to the home vs. AT&T’s fiber to the node and U-verse services, but we haven’t spent a lot of time on DOCSIS 3.0 deployments. Sure, it will provide ultrafast broadband, such as the 101 Mbps services that Cablevision is offering or the 50 Mbps that Comcast boasts. But for providers, the upgrade makes a tremendous amount of sense for business reasons beyond happy customers — so much so, that 45 percent of the country will have access to D3 rollouts by the end of this year, according to data from research firm Pike & Fisher. (See chart for provider details.)
Given that the average residential customer doesn’t currently need 50 Mbps down, and likely won’t spend $140 a month to get it, why are cable companies doing it? First off, the rollouts are cheap. Cablevision has said it costs it about $70 per home to deploy DOCSIS 3.0. Tim McElgunn, chief analyst at Pike & Fisher, estimated that it generally costs about $100 per home to deploy, or a few billion to upgrade across a cable company. Verizon is spending $23 billion to deploy FiOS, and general estimates are that it costs about $1,000 per home to deploy.
For a relatively small investment, cable providers get upgraded to a faster service that has benefits such as IPv6 addressing capabilities. They also can offer fiber-like speeds to business customers without spending more money to deploy fiber. Cable providers have seen growth in residential services stay relatively flat, so they’re looking to business access and interactive advertising to grow. D3 doesn’t really affect advertising, but it is an attractive offer to dangle in front of corporate users.
Chart courtesy of Pike & Fisher.
I have the new Comcast 50 Mb per second service and it is great. Speed is good!
With 50+ Mbps of data available, the cable data pipe becomes more than enough to handle all our media needs. Why should we pay the cable company for their channel distribution services, then, when we can get almost all our television services over the web via Hulu, downloaded via iTunes or Amazon, and streamed via Neflix over Tivo or Roku. Mass TV market dwellers can also pull the network watercooler shows, news and sporting events in over the air in HD. I’m glad to see cable stepping up to the plate and striving to win the bandwidth game. It will be interesting to see how they handle the effect the extra bandwidth has on subscription to their channel distribution services. I can envision their response becoming very anti-competitive. Nevertheless, I think this is the right play for them. They have the most to lose if the telcos with fiber to the DSLAM, FTTH and FTTN beats them to the punch.
Nice to read that competition is picking up. But how does the building of fiber work in the US? It sounds like building owners let ISPs build the networks to the home, and give the ISP a monopoly on that cable. Why don’t the building owners build the network and make the cables open to competition. Then you would have an unlimited number of competitors that can offer internet, voip, tv etc.
I wish Comcast would do this a little faster already…the Sacramento area needs 50mps down!
[...] Only about 10 percent of 600 participants in a survey conducted by Pike & Fisher said they were willing to pay more than what they already spend for Internet service. This is despite a third of them ranking Internet access as the most important discretionary item in their budgets — and the service they’re least likely to cut. These results complement findings last year that price will be a big driver in winning over consumers to telco TV. So with residential markets apparently tapped out, most providers are looking at businesses. [...]
[...] May 2nd, 2009 · No Comments I hope broadband competition in the New York City area is the wave of the future.Complete info at Gigaom. [...]
[...] in parts of New York. Cox is among a growing list of cable broadband providers that are using DOCSIS 3.0 to compete with Verizon’s FiOS assault. Like most of its peers, Cox is selectively rolling [...]
[...] in parts of New York. Cox is among a growing list of cable broadband providers that are using DOCSIS 3.0 to compete with Verizon’s FiOS assault. Like most of its peers, Cox is selectively rolling [...]
[...] providers seem to be in the news every week for one reason or another, but an important issue is arising in New York: companies are finding they have to compete with each other for customers, which really just [...]
[...] DOCSIS 3.0: Coming Soon to a Cableco Near You. [...]
[...] driving down the total operational costs of running a network (for cable providers, this will mean eventually moving to DOCSIS 3.0; telcos will move to fiber). On the wireless side, the shift to LTE will enable this same model. [...]
[...] | Sunday, May 10, 2009 | 4:14 PM PT | 0 comments Over the last few weeks, we have started to see cable companies offering broadband connections with speeds ranging from 50 Mbps to 100 Mbps. Several fiber-based [...]
[...] are underway in the U.S. but the IPTV transition is a little further off. In the meantime, the rollout of DOCSIS 3.0 has helped boost revenue at Motorola and Arris, another cable equipment vendor. Motorola estimates [...]
[...] at $62.95 per month. Comcast also announced plans to deliver superfast broadband powered by its DOCIS 3.0 rollout to Washington, D.C., in the next few [...]
[...] which is the driving force behind several cable operators’ planned DOCSIS 3.0 upgrades that will boost broadband speeds to 50Mbps or even 100Mbps, is putting pressure on the cable [...]
[...] said on the call. For a look at how quickly the cable companies are deploying superfast broadband, check out the chart we created back in April. Comcast and Cablevision are the leaders, while Time Warner Cable, RCN and Insight Communications [...]
[...] broadband, their wired broadband speeds should be faster. Both the telcos and cable companies are rapidly deploying technology to boost speeds on both the downstream and the upstream side, with the exception of a few laggards. [...]
[...] By Om Malik | Thursday, September 24, 2009 | 7:00 AM PT | 0 comments Time Warner Cable today finally launched its super high-speed wideband consumer and business Internet service in New York. It’s been a long time coming, for as we’ve noted before, Time Warner Cable is a laggard when compared to other cable providers. [...]
Check out this thread. I live in Woodside, NY. I have less than 1 meg download most of the time, and most people in this area also experience the same problem. I wonder if D3 will help this?
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r23005505-TWC-Super-slow-cable-Internet-Woodside-Queens~start=40
[...] providers are able to bundle their channels together to provide faster up and downstream access using DOCSIS 3.0, but extracting more performance and speeds from copper is [...]
[...] PST No Comments 0 Time Warner Cable plans to expand its DOCSIS 3.0 broadband upgrades in portions of Texas, Ohio and upstate New York during the first half of this year, [...]
[...] responded to my questions about the deployment details. However, earlier this week it said it was offering DOCSIS 3.0 supported business class service in Cincinnati with two tiers that cost more than $300 a month. The [...]
[...] also the competition with cable, which can deliver faster speeds with a simple DOCSIS 3.0 upgrade that can cost a few hundred dollars per home, as compared to the higher cost of delivering [...]
[...] into 6MHz channels, each of which delivers about 38 Mbps, the equivalent of two HD channels. The DOCSIS 3.0 standard bonds those channels together to create faster broadband speeds. The proposed new standard would [...]