Top 25 U.S. ISPs by Subscriber: Q4 2007

The top ten ISPs on our list now have more than three-quarters of the ISP market—and we count Time Warner twice in the top ten.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [April 10, 2008]

A warning about consolidation
The top five ISPs in our list (counting Time Warner twice) have a combined market share of 58.1 percent, up from 57.4 percent in Q2. The top ten ISPs in our list (again counting Time Warner twice) have a combined market share of 75.4 percent and the rest of the listed ISPs have a combined market share of 6.2 percent. We estimate that all ISPs not on this list share 18.4 percent of customers. Thus, all ISPs below the top ten have a combined market share of about 24.6 percent.

A few corporations are consolidating their control over the internet (or, as Bob Frankston would prefer I write, consolidating control over IP transit).

Data
We use Jupiter Research estimates in several areas (note, Jupiter Research is now part of JupiterKagan). Jupiter Research estimated the total number of subscribers in the United States to be 91.7 million subscribers at the end of Q2 and we do not have more recent data. Note, however, that more recent data is available to Jupiter Research subscribers.

This number does not include: subscribers at universities and in government.

It includes residential consumer accounts and some business accounts (the distinction is eroding as residential broadband speeds rise and telework grows).

Notes
Note that Insight Broadband's plans to go private, acquired by The Carlyle Group and insiders, were completed on December 16, 2005. We do not have updated data for Insight.

Adelphia has been acquired by Time Warner and Comcast.

Similarly, ALLTEL is now part of Windstream, formerly known as Valor.

Data for SBC includes 4.108 million ISDN business lines.

Data for CenturyTel includes dialup subscribers, which were not disclosed in Q3. They comprise about 11 percent of the total, which is a good number. Dialup is not a growth business, but it remains profitable even as the subscriber base declines.

Verizon now has 1.3 million FiOS customers.

Covad has 490,600 broadband customers (416,000 wholesale and 71,000 direct) plus 3,600 fixed wireless business customers (all direct). All numbers except fixed wireless are declining.

ISPs with fewer than 100,000 subscribers
We added the two Alaska ISPs, ACS and GCI. ACS functions like an ILEC, and GCI is a cable company that functions like a CLEC

We also added SureWest, the biggest small town ILEC. The Roseville Telephone Company, with a miniscule ILEC footprint, has built out DSL, cellular, and a variety of other service and is an impressive example to all ISPs.

If you know of any ISPs with less than 100,000 subscribers that should be on this list, let us know by using the feedback button below.

Off the list
RCN is reporting "Revenue Generating Units" as opposed to subscriber numbers, and has therefore been removed from the list for failing to report subscriber numbers.

Methodology
Subscriber counts are as of December 31, 2007, except for First Communications.

Note that, due to rounding, the market share percentages in this chart will not always add up to exactly 100.0 percent even though they do for this quarter.

We do not have numbers for several key ISPs, such as MSN. Therefore, the "Other ISPs" listing overstates the role of the independent ISP in the U.S. market.

We do not show most ISPs with fewer than 100,000 subscribers. Although some smaller ISPs, most of which are privately held and therefore do not file SEC statements, do disclose subscriber numbers, the vast majority do not.

Tim Sanders of The Final Mile is collecting data on fixed wireless broadband ISPs, which are quite small at this time (with the exception of Clearwire).

We show sources for all data.

Also see page 2: How We Count >

Update
Insight Communications released Q4 2007 results on April 16, 2007 [.pdf], after we had published our update. The company had 754,600 broadband customers at year end, which would place it fourteenth on our list.