Comcast Asks The Phone Companies To Surrender

Investing

Published: May 1, 2007 10:00 am

Comcast (CMCSA) was all excited about its earnings. Revenue rose ot $7.4 billion and operating income to $1.3 billion. The dreaded "triple play" of voice, cable TV, and broadband did well. Cable revenue rose 12% to $7 billion as the company added 644,000 new digital cable subscribers.

But, the really impressive number in the earnings was the voice customer increase. The company added 571,000 new VoIP customers. Those probably came right over from the phone companies. Comcast’s voice service is now marketed to 35 million homes representing 73% Comcast’s service footprint

But, that is not the worst news for the Bells. Comcast’s CEO today said that it expects its phone service penetration to hit 20% by the end of 2009. That is seven million customers if Comcast does not increase the number of homes where it can sell the service.

AT&T (T) and especially Verizon (VZ) keep saying that their new fiber-to-the-home services will eventually take millions of customers from the cable companies. But, someone has to be wrong. Very wrong.

Comcasts cannot end up with over seven million voice customers while the phone companies add millions of "triple play" customers that they would have to take from the cable operators.

The math don’t work.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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