1 | SBC (AT&T) (business and consumer DSL, ISDN, U-Verse, and satellite) | 17.3 | 17.5% |
2 | Comcast (cable broadband) | 12.4 | 12.6% |
3 | America Online (all U.S. AOL brand accounts) | 10.9 | 11.1% |
4 | Verizon (FiOS and DSL) | 7.7 | 7.8% |
5 | Road Runner (cable broadband, business and residential) | 7.5 | 7.5% |
6 | EarthLink (DSL, dialup, cable, satellite, PLC, and webhosting—SK EarthLink and some other business lines not included) | 4.3 | 4.4% |
7 | Charter (cable broadband) | 2.6 | 2.6% |
8 | Qwest (DSL only) | 2.4 | 2.4% |
9 | Cablevision (cable broadband) | 2.2 | 2.2% |
10 | United Online (counting paid access only) | 2.0 | 2.0% |
11 | Embarq (DSL only, formerly part of Sprint) | 1.2 | 1.2% |
12 | Windstream (DSL only, formerly ALLTEL and Valor) | .75 | 0.8% |
13 | Insight BB (cable broadband) | .67 | 0.7% |
14 | Mediacom (cable broadband, dialup, and SMB broadband) | .61 | 0.6% |
15 | Covad (broadband only) | .55 | 0.6% |
16 | CenturyTel (DSL only) | .50 | 0.5% |
17 | Citizens (DSL only) | .48 | 0.5% |
18 | Hughes DIRECWAY (satellite broadband) | .26 | 0.3% |
19 | LocalNet (dialup) | .26 | 0.3% |
20 | First Communications (DSL and BPL and dialup, both business and residential) | .24 | 0.2% |
21 | Cincinnati Bell (DSL only) | .21 | 0.2% |
Feedback September 21, 2007
Jay Rolls, Cox VP of technology, points out that although Cox is private, it is still publishing subscriber numbers. As of Q2, 2007, Cox claims 3.5 million broadband customers, which would place it seventh on our list.
A warning about consolidation
The top five ISPs in our list (counting Time Warner twice) have a combined market share of 56.5 percent. The combined market share of ISPs ranked 6 through 21 is 19.4 percent.
A few corporations are consolidating their control over the internet (or, as Bob Frankston would prefer I write, consolidating control over IP transit).
Data
We use Jupiter Research estimates in several areas (note, Jupiter Research is now part of JupiterKagan). Jupiter Research estimates the total number of subscribers in the United States to be 91.7 million subscribers at the end of Q2. Note, however, that superior data is available to Jupiter Research subscribers.
This number does not include: subscribers at universities and in government. It includes residential consumer accounts and some business accounts (the distinction is eroding as residential broadband speeds rise and telework grows).
About data concerning certain ISPs
We use an old Jupiter Research estimate for the number of subscribers of Hughes DIRECWAY.
Note that Insight Broadband's plans to go private, acquired by The Carlyle Group and insiders, were completed on December 16, 2005.
Adelphia has been acquired by Time Warner and Comcast.
Similarly, ALLTEL is now part of Windstream, formerly known as Valor.
Off the list
RCN is reporting "Revenue Generating Units" as opposed to subscriber numbers, and has therefore been removed from the list for failing to report subscriber numbers.
Cox has gone private and no longer reports numbers. We have removed it from the list.
GCI (of Alaska) fell off the list, but we expect it to grow back.
Clearwire claims it had 299,000 subscribers as of June 30, 2007, but does not list numbers for the U.S. alone. If 80 percent of its subscribers were in the U.S., it would have 239,200 U.S. subscribers and would rank 20th on our list.
Methodology
Subscriber counts are as of June 30, 2007, except for DIRECWAY.
Note that, due to rounding, the market share percentages in this chart will not always add up to exactly 100.0 percent even though they do for this quarter.
We do not have numbers for several key ISPs, such as Cox and MSN. Therefore, the "Other ISPs" listing overstates the role of the independent ISP in the U.S. market.
We do not show ISPs with fewer than 100,000 subscribers. Although some smaller ISPs, such as Severna Park, Md.-based ToadNet, do disclose subscriber numbers, the vast majority do not.
Tim Sanders of The Final Mile is collecting data on fixed wireless broadband ISPs, which are quite small at this time (with the exception of Clearwire).
We show sources for all numbers.
This table shows subscriber growth rates at the ISPs we watch:
Unique subscribers
In order to calculate the number of subscribers in the rest of the U.S., we have to take the number of subscriber in the U.S., provided by Jupiter Research, and subtract the number of unique subscribers in the ISPs in our list.
Jupiter Research estimates that there were 91.7 million residential subscribers in the U.S on June 30, 2007.
The ISPs in our rankings account for approximately 67,909,800 unique subscribers.
We try not to count any subscriber twice. For example, a subscriber to EarthLink DSL may also be counted in Covad's DSL numbers and in the ILEC's DSL numbers as well. We therefore do not count EarthLink and Covad broadband towards our total of unique subscribers.
We assume that 20 percent of AOL's subscriber base obtains access through another ISP, either as BYOA, or in a more traditional broadband arrangement. As AOL and Road Runner work together more and more, we expect the subscriber bases to overlap more than they do today, and hope that AOL, which is very good about disclosure, will reveal the extent of the subscriber overlap.
This leaves us with the following unique subscriber numbers:
Here's how we calculate the number of subscribers of the rest of the ISPs in the U.S. We substract the number of unique subscribers, 67,909,800, from the 91.7 million total individual subscribers. That gives us 23,790,200 or approximately 23.8 million subscribers for the rest of the ISPs in the U.S., which is 24.1 percent of the market.
The only other ISP with a subscriber loss was United Online, another competitor, which is trying to exit the ISP business and this quarter did exit the VoIP business.
Line sharing
Note that although the total subscriber count of our ISPs declined in Q2, almost all of that decline occurred in subscribers served by line sharing. AOL lost another million subscribers and EarthLink lost almost 20 percent of its subscribers when a deal with Sprint Nextel (now Embarq) ended and was not renewed. The monopolies grew, but very slowly, just a few percentage points.
As the FCC eliminates line sharing, and with it almost all competition, the monopolies will be free to behave badly, reducing service and raising rates.
They will also be free to stop investing in infrastructure and growth.
Market share calculation
So how many subscribers were not unique subscribers? The total subscribership of our ISPs is 74,986,800. Of this, we believe that 67,909,800 are unique subscribers. The remainder, 7,077,000, we believe appear in the numbers of more than one ISP on our list.
In order to calculate market share, we add the remainder, 7,077,000, to the Jupiter Research subscriber total, 91,700,000, to get 98,777,000, which we use to determine the market share of each ISP. This is the total number of unique subscribers in the United States plus the number of double-counted subscribers in the ISPs listed in our table.
Here is a sample market share calcluation: AOL's apparent ISP total (including non-unique subscribers) is 10,928,000. We divide 10,928,000 by 98,777,000 to obtain the market share percentage shown on our table, 17.5 percent.
Transparency
In building subscriber rankings, we are constantly frustrated by the quality of the data we are forced to work with. We have, in contrast, endeavored to make our sources plain and our calculations obvious. We welcome feedback.
Also note that almost all companies on the list are public companies. We would like to list all providers, including non-facilities based companies, but most ISPs are privately held and do not disclose subscriber numbers at all (certainly not on a quarterly basis).
At the moment, we are listing only those ISPs that have more than 100,000 subscribers.
ISP-Planet Managing Editor