Given the frequent claims of lobbyists for the cable companies regarding how incredibly competitive the broadband market is in the United States, I thought we might want to hear what John Malone, one of the most aggressive cable CEOs ever (TCI) has to say on the subject. He is now with Liberty, a media company among other things. Last year, in an investor call, he said,
Really, I think the cable business in the U.S. looks very attractive. It looks like the telcos are not going to aggressively overbuild cable with fiber and so, cable has a definite advantage when comes to high speed broadband, which seems to be something the public is totally in love with.
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But no, I think cable is very strong on the broadband side and I think the threat of wireless broadband taking away high speed connectivity is way overblown. There just is not enough bandwidth on the wireless side to substantially damage cable’s unique ability to delivery very high speed connectivity. So I think everybody is going to do well in this mix.
I excised some middle comments that were also interesting – suggesting that cable may lose video customers but will do very well by continuing to grow broadband subscribers (a much higher profit margin service).
For years, we have been saying that wireless is not a competitor to wired (specifically cable) and that there is no danger of competition when it comes to cable. Nice to see the insiders agree. Now if the we could just get the FCC to listen to those comments rather than the those of lobbyists…
Credit to Susan Crawford’s new book, Captive Audience, where I read it first.
Photo courtesy of JSquish via Wikipedia Commons
