LEC Line Loss Summary, 2007

For the past week, I've been digging into the massive losses in Local Exchange Carrier Switched Access lines, trying to quantify where all of these lines are going.  I looked at how cable voice services, fixed-mobile substitution, and VoIP are all contributing to LEC line losses.  Now it's time to summarize all of the data in a single table:

LEC Access Line Migration, 2007	EOY 2006	EOY 2007	Change in "Lines"	Estimated Contribution to LEC Line Losses
AT&T (landlines)	66,469,000	61,582,000	(4,887,000)	(4,887,000)
Verizon (landlines)	45,100,000	41,441,000	(3,659,000)	(3,659,000)
Qwest	12,299,465	11,500,000	(799,465)	(799,465)
Comcast Digital Voice	1,900,000	4,377,000	2,477,000	2,477,000
Time Warner Cable Voice	1,860,000	2,900,000	1,040,000	1,040,000
CableVision Voice	1,209,000	1,592,000	383,000	383,000
Charter Voice	445,800	959,300	513,500	513,500
Vonage	2,224,111	2,580,227	356,116	213,670
Skype Real Users in USA*	6,230,000	8,000,000	1,770,000	0
AT&T (wireless)	60,962,000	70,067,000	9,105,000	1,379,853
Verizon Wireless	59,029,650	65,700,000	6,670,350	1,010,884
Sprint Nextel	53,100,000	53,800,000	700,000	106,084
T-Mobile USA	25,041,000	28,685,000	3,644,000	552,244
MetroPCS Communications	2,940,986	3,962,786	1,021,800	154,853
Leap Wireless	2,226,000	2,860,000	634,000	96,082
Estimated Other Cable Line Migration				367,792
Estimated Other Wireless Line Migration				93,455
Estimated Other VoIP Line Migration				28,036
Estimated Business Line Migration				467,273
Estimated Fax and Modem Line Disconnection				461,740
			Total	-

*Note: Skype "Real Users" figures are from Hudson Barton's Borderless Communicator blog.  He has an interesting related post on the LEC line loss theme today.

To create this table I relied on data from annual reports of public companies, data from the FCC Annual Report and Analysis of Competitive Market Conditions With Respect to Commercial Mobile Services, comments from Telecosm readers, and a little guesswork on the margins. 

Estimating fixed-mobile substitution is the hard part of this table.  The FCC report estimates that between the 2nd half of 2005 and the 2nd half of 2006, the percentage of U.S. households that only had wireless phone service grew about 4% to something between 11% and 12% of all 110M U.S. households.  I'm guessing that by the end of 2007 the percentage of U.S. households that used wireless as their primary phone line had grown to about 15.3%.  However, some of the incremental growth in wireless-only households did not switch from LEC services, instead switching from cable and other VoIP services, so I tried to account for that in the table.

The "Estimated Other Cable Line Migration" is estimated at 4% of the total line losses at the big three LECs, to account for Cox Communications, who is privately held, and to account for the host of smaller cable companies.

I'm guessing that VoIP accounted for only about 2.6% of the overall LEC line losses in 2007, due to the fact that some of Vonage's customers are overseas, and to account for the fact that VoIP providers struggled or went out of business in 2007 (SunRocket).

The pie chart below summarizes the data for the major causes of LEC Line Losses:

Comments

[Dave Burstein]

Ike

Interesting stuff, that seems on target. But I'm trying to figure out how you calculated the telco to cable line loss. It's not obvious to me how to be precise about that.

Thanks
db