2.95M Americans Added Broadband in 2021, and Almost All of Them Got Cable
The broadband business didn't boom in 2021 the way it did in 2020, but the biggest phone and cable providers in the US still racked up more than 2.95 million new subscribers, according to Leichtman Research Group, a consultancy that tracks telecom customer trends.
That total is down from the roughly 4.9 million new subscribers Leichtman reported for 2020, when the pandemic forced so many more people to work from home, but up from the estimated 2.5 million who added broadband in 2019.
Leichtman says these numbers cover a group of firms representing some 96% of the broadband market, with about 6% reflecting non-residential subscriptions in 2020. Most of these figures come from earnings announcements, but Leichtman made its own estimates for privately held firms like Cox.
Cable accounted for almost all of 2020’s growth, 2.8 million and change, and most of that came from sign-ups at the two biggest internet providers in America. Comcast added 1.33 million subscribers for its Xfinity service to reach 31.9 million total, and Charter’s Spectrum service took in 1.2 million new subscribers to hit 30 million.
Among the eight cable operators counted in Leichtman’s survey, only Altice lost business, with some 3,400 customers cutting that cord. One possible factor: Its Optimum service cut upload speeds last July, with customers on its 100Mbps tier seeing their upstream bandwidth whacked from 35Mbps to 5Mbps.
But where wireline-phone companies lost some 620,000 subscribers in 2019 and gained under 40,000 in 2020, they grew by a more respectable 140,000 last year.
Verizon, which has been converting old copper circuits to fiber to expand the reach of its Fios fiber-optic service, contributed the most to that growth, picking up
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