Charter’s acquisition of Time Warner Cable and Bright House pushed the operator ahead of Verizon in Vertical Systems Group’s latest U.S. Carrier Ethernet Leaderboard results, and makes it the largest cable provider of retail Ethernet services, according to the research. Charter was added to the ranking for the first time at the third position based on aggregated ports from its TWC/Bright House acquisitions in May. Back at the end of 2015, TWC was the top cable operator and ranked fifth on the U.S. board, while Charter and Bright House were in the “challenge tier.”
The mid-2016 results in rank order based on retail port share are AT&T, Level 3, Charter, Verizon, CenturyLink, Comcast, XO, Cox and Windstream.
Vertical Systems Group calculated port shares using the mid-year base of enterprise installations of Ethernet services in the U.S. plus input from surveys of Ethernet providers. The Leaderboard threshold is 4 percent or more of billable port installations.
Charter’s moves means Verizon’s mid-2016 rank drops to fourth from third in 2015 and CenturyLink moves from fourth to fifth. Additionally, XO moves into the seventh share position ahead of Cox, which went down to eighth.
“The competitive balance of the Ethernet marketplace is evident, as more than 60 percent of new connections were delivered by CLECs and cable MSOs during the first half of 2016,” Rick Malone, principal of Vertical Systems Group, observes. “Our analysis shows a 17 percent annualized growth rate for U.S. Carrier Ethernet services for the full year.”
The “challenge tier” in the research includes providers with between 1 percent and 4 percent share of the U.S. retail Ethernet market. Grabbing a position in the mid-2016 research in that tier (in alphabetical order) are Cogent, Integra, Lightpath (an Altice USA brand) and Zayo.
