Telco shareholders take note: The cable guy is beating you!

While the mantra of the AT&T’s management keeps telling us that consumers don’t want more bandwidth, consider this: cable companies are adding customers at a faster clip than they are.

Cable operators added a collective 1.3 million telephone customers in the first quarter, slightly ahead of the 1.2 million the industry added in the fourth quarter, according to media analyst Cynthia Brumfield’s IP Democracy blog.

By the end of the first quarter, the top nine U.S. cable operators served a total of 14.5 million voice customers, up 57% year over year and representing about 13% of the homes available for service, according to IP Democracy.

Telephone companies also gained ground on cable for video service and currently serve about 5.7 million video customers, according to IP Democracy.

On the broadband front, cable operators added more high-speed Internet subscribers in the first quarter than their telco competitors for the first time since the third quarter of 2004, according to Leichtman Research Group.

According to Leichtman, the 19 largest cable and telephone service providers added more than 2.2 million broadband customers in the quarter and provide high-speed Internet service to more than 94% of all broadband subscribers, or about 64 million customers. Cable operators provided service to about 34.7 million of those customers, with telcos representing 29.5 million subscribers. (Multichannel News)

Now consider this: Cable companies charge higher rates and their customer service is awful. The only thing the typically offer that is better is bandwidth. So AT&T, tell me again how the consumer does not care about how big the pipe is. That is the only logical reason for them to be buying into cable in greater numbers.