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US telecoms industry valued at $1 trillion
08/04/08
Research by London-based analyst Report Buyer suggests that total
revenue for the US telecommunication industry has reached $1
trillion.
“2008 USA - Telecoms, Wireless and Broadband” reports that telecom
service revenues reached $458 billion, of which wireless service
revenue accounted for approximately 31%.
The
study shows that the number of traditional fixed line customers
continued to drop sharply during 2007, with Verizon and AT&T both
reporting declines of around 10% in residential wireline accounts.
The growth in VoIP was a major contributor to this decline, in
particular cable VoIP, with subscriber growth rates around 75%.
Rhe
Regional Bell Operating Companies continued to focus on their fibre
deployments in response to increasing competition from the Multi
System Operators’ VoIP and triple play offerings. State-by-state
video franchising reform continued apace, thus facilitating the
deployment by the RBOCs of Internet Protocol TV on their expanding
fibre networks. By late 2007 FttH deployments in the US were growing
at over 110% per annum.
Authors of the report say total broadband subscribers continued to
grow solidly, although in terms of broadband penetration, the US
continued to edge towards the bottom half of the OECD tables.
They
further note that broadband DSL subscriber growth continued to
outpace cable subscriber growth, though cable still leads in terms
of market share. However, with the telcos aggressively deploying
fibre networks, the telcos will soon overtake the cable companies in
terms of broadband market share.
The
analysis shows that whilst WiFi was becoming increasingly
commonplace in the USA during 2007, with a burgeoning hotspot
network, laptops being automatically equipped with WiFi cards and
WiFi moving beyond the laptop, nevertheless doubts were being raised
over the viability of municipal WiFi programs following the
difficulties experienced in cities such as San Francisco, Chicago
and Philadelphia.
The
authors note that wireless data revenues continued to enjoy strong
growth in 2007, underpinned by robust wireless data revenue growth.
Thus while overall voice Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) decreased
during the third quarter of 2007, data ARPU sustained a steady
incline. By late 2007 data service revenues accounted for
approximately 18% of total wireless service revenues, up from around
4% in 2004.
The
majority of wireless data revenues were being generated by
non-messaging applications and services such as music downloads,
mobile TV, video blogs and Internet-accessed entertainment services.
Nick Gibson, editor
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