November 5, 2001 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Three quarters of U.S. households will have high-speed Internet access available to them by year-end 2001, up from the 60%of homes passed by cable modem or DSL service providers at the end of 2000. Cable modem service will continue to be more broadly available, with cable reaching 66% of U.S. homes by year-end 2001, compared to 45% of U.S. homes with DSL available, according to the Yankee Group’s (yankeegroup.com) recently published report, “Residential Broadband: Provisioning Cable Modem Service.”
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“Building out the network to make broadband available is only half the
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battle,” notes Michael Goodman, a senior analyst with the Yankee Group’s
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Media & Entertainment Strategies research and consulting practice. “Success
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will increasingly be driven by the network operators’ ability to lower the
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cost of hooking up individual households for broadband service.”
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Cable operators now spend an average of $360 installing equipment to support
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a new broadband subscriber, but that cost can drop significantly as cable
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companies encourage more new users to self-install cable modems purchased
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from retail outlets. For cable operators such as Comcast, which now sees
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more than one third of its new broadband customers install their own cable
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modems, the adoption of self-installation can translate into millions of
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dollars of savings annually. Other factors, such as the cross-training of
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cable service technicians to install video or broadband services, will also
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make installation efforts more efficient.
