Local Telephone Competition: Status as of June 30, 2011

The Federal Communications Commission has used FCC Form 477 to collect subscribership information from telephone service providers – the incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs), competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs), and mobile telephony providers – for more than a decade. The FCC has required interconnected Voice over Internet Protocol (“interconnected VoIP”) service providers to report subscribership information since December 2008 because the use of VoIP technology is growing rapidly and it increasingly is used to provide local telephone service.

This report summarizes information about telephone services as of June 30, 2011. It demonstrates that interconnected VoIP service subscribership has continued to increase while subscribership to traditional wired telephone services has declined. The FCC also updates summary statistics for the mobile telephony subscribership information collected by Form 477.

• In June 2011, there were 112 million end-user switched access lines in service and 34 million interconnected VoIP subscriptions in the United States, or 146 million wireline retail local telephone service connections in total.
• Interconnected VoIP subscriptions had increased by 17% (from 29 million to 34 million) and retail switched access lines had decreased by 8% (from 122 million to 112 million) between June 2010 and June 2011. The combined effect was an annual decrease of 3% in wireline retail local telephone service connections (from 151 million to 146 million).
• Of the 146 million wireline retail local telephone service connections in June 2011, 84 million (or 58%) were residential connections and 62 million (or 42%) were business connections.
• Cross-classified by technology and customer type, the 146 million wireline retail local telephone service connections in June 2011 were: 38% residential switched access lines, 39% business switched access lines, 20% residential interconnected VoIP subscriptions, and 3% business interconnected VoIP subscriptions.