Top U.S. ISPs by Subscriber:
How We Count

On this page, we show how we calculate the total U.S. ISP market and individual ISPs' market share.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [December 13, 2007]

This table shows subscriber growth rates at the ISPs we watch:

Unique subscribers
In order to calculate the number of subscribers in the rest of the U.S., we have to take the number of subscriber in the U.S., provided by Jupiter Research, and subtract the number of unique subscribers in the ISPs in our list.

Jupiter Research estimates that there were 91.7 million residential subscribers in the U.S on June 30, 2007 and we do not have updated subscriber numbers for Q3.

The ISPs in our rankings account for approximately 73,071,841 unique subscribers.

We try not to count any subscriber twice. For example, a subscriber to EarthLink DSL may also be counted in Covad's DSL numbers and in the ILEC's DSL numbers as well. We therefore do not count EarthLink and Covad broadband towards our total of unique subscribers.

We assume that 20 percent of AOL's subscriber base obtains access through another ISP, either as BYOA, or in a more traditional broadband arrangement. As AOL and Road Runner work together more and more, we expect the subscriber bases to overlap more than they do today, and hope that AOL, which is very good about disclosure, will reveal the extent of the subscriber overlap.

This leaves us with the following unique subscriber numbers:

Here's how we calculate the number of subscribers of the rest of the ISPs in the U.S. We substract the number of unique subscribers, 73,071,841, from the 91.7 million total individual subscribers. That gives us 18,628,159 or approximately 18.6 million subscribers for the rest of the ISPs in the U.S., which we estimate is 18.9 percent of the market.

The only other ISP with a subscriber loss was United Online, another competitor, which is trying to exit the ISP business and this quarter did exit the VoIP business.

Line sharing
Note that although the total subscriber count of our ISPs declined in Q2, almost all of that decline occurred in subscribers served by line sharing. AOL lost another million subscribers and EarthLink lost almost 20 percent of its subscribers when a deal with Sprint Nextel (now Embarq) ended and was not renewed. The monopolies grew, but very slowly, just a few percentage points.

As the FCC eliminates line sharing, and with it almost all competition, the monopolies will be free to behave badly, reducing service and raising rates.

They will also be free to stop investing in infrastructure and growth.

Market share calculation
So how many subscribers were not unique subscribers? The total subscribership of our ISPs is 79,746,941. Of this, we believe that 73,071,841 are unique subscribers. The remainder, 6,675,100, we believe appear in the numbers of more than one ISP on our list.

In order to calculate market share, we add the remainder, 6,675,100, to the Jupiter Research subscriber total, 91,700,000, to get 98,375,100, which we use to determine the market share of each ISP. This is the total number of unique subscribers in the United States plus the number of double-counted subscribers in the ISPs listed in our table.

Here is a sample market share calcluation: AOL's apparent ISP total (including non-unique subscribers) is 10,928,000. We divide 10,928,000 by 98,777,000 to obtain the market share percentage shown on our table, 17.5 percent.

Transparency
In building subscriber rankings, we are constantly frustrated by the quality of the data we are forced to work with. We have, in contrast, endeavored to make our sources plain and our calculations obvious. We welcome feedback.

Also note that almost all companies on the list are public companies. We would like to list all providers, including non-facilities based companies, but most ISPs are privately held and do not disclose subscriber numbers at all (certainly not on a quarterly basis).

At the moment, we are listing only those ISPs that have more than 100,000 subscribers.

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Online Resources:
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	Subscriber Value by Category