Top 22 U.S. ISPs by Subscriber: Q1 2004

The incumbents continue to do well while the competitors, are in cost cutting or even restructuring mode.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [May 20, 2004]

Rank	ISP	Subs. (millions)	Date & Source	Market Share
1	America Online (all U.S. AOL brand accounts)	24.0	[April 28, 2004] Trending Schedules [.pdf]	26.1%
2	Comcast (cable broadband)	<5.7	[April 28, 2004] Press Release	6.2%
3	United Online [3.1 million paid, 2.3 million free accounts]	5.4	[May 3, 2004] SEC Filing and Press Release	5.9%
4	EarthLink (DSL, dialup, cable, satellite, and PLC)	5.3	[April 20, 2004] Press Release	5.8%
5	SBC (DSL only)	4.0	[May 6, 2004] SEC Filing	4.3%
6	Road Runner (cable broadband)	3.4	[April 28, 2004] Trending Schedules [.pdf]	3.7%
7	Verizon (DSL only)	2.7	[May 7, 2004] SEC Filing	2.9%
8	Cox (cable broadband)	>2.1	[April 29, 2004] Press Release	2.3%
9	Charter (cable broadband and 8,900 dialup accounts)	1.7	[May 10, 2004] SEC Filing	1.8%
10	BellSouth (DSL only)	1.6	[May 6, 2004] SEC Filing	1.8%
11	Adelphia (cable broadband)	1.1	[May 12, 2004] Corporate Communications	1.2%
12	Cablevision (cable broadband)	1.1	[May 10, 2004] SEC Filing	1.2%
13	Qwest (DSL only)	.74	[May 4, 2004] Press Release	0.8%
14	Covad (broadband only)	.52	[May 17, 2004] SEC Filing	0.6%
15	Mediacom (cable broadband)	.30	[May 7, 2004] Press Release	0.3%
16	Insight BB (cable broadband)	.26	[Feb. 25, 2004] Press Release	0.3%
17	Hughes DIRECWAY (satellite broadband)	.20	[May 19, 2004] Corporate Communications	0.2%
18	ALLTEL (DSL only)	.18	[May 7, 2004] SEC Filing	0.2%
19	LocalNet (dialup and cable broadband)	.12	[May 12, 2004] Corporate Communications	0.1%
20	Cincinnati Bell (DSL only)	.11	[May 10, 2004] SEC Filing	0.1%
21	CenturyTel (DSL only)	.10	[May 7, 2004] SEC Filing	0.1%
22	Internet America (dialup)	.07	[Feb. 17, 2004] SEC Filing	0.1%
23	Other U.S. ISPs	31.4		34.1%

We use Jupiter Research estimates for the total number of subscribers in the United States: 79.2 million subscribers. This number does not include: subscribers at work, at universities, or in government. It only includes residential consumer accounts.

All subscriber counts are as of March 31, 2004. We do not have numbers for ATX, RCN, MSN, and AT&T Worldnet. In addition, Covad and the ILECs did not disclose dialup subscriber numbers (although Charter and others did).

We remove two ISPs that are restructuring, RCN and ATX.

Although we do report claimed Adelphia numbers, a witness in the Adelphia fraud trial said this week, according to the Wall Street Journal, that subscriber numbers was a key metric that was inflated as part of the fraud. Whoever buys Adelphia will find out how many subscribers they really have.

MSN notes losses are dropping fast, due to "strong advertising revenue and paid search, while operation costs remained flat and customer acquisition expenditures declined." We think the company is losing subscribers fast, and is not spending on advertising at all, but Microsoft's SEC filing does not provide the details.

Comcast said they had "nearly" a specific, round number of subscribers, hence we precede their subscriber number with the "fewer than" character: "<", and Cox said they had "over" a specific number of subscribers, so we precede their subscriber number with a "greater than" character: ">".

We show sources for all numbers. Where the source says "Corporate Communications" we mean that we contacted the company directly. These numbers are less reliable than the other numbers we use.

Note that, due to rounding, the market share percentages in this chart may not add up to exactly 100.0 percent.

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