The DSL death march continues

The slow death march of DSL continues, especially at two of the largest phone companies in America.

Last week, Verizon reported a loss of about 89,000 DSL connections and a boom in demand for its faster fiber optic service, FiOS, which added about 193,000 new subscribers. We are seeing similar trends at AT&T as well. Things are so bad at Ma Bell, that it buried the news at the bottom of the earnings release. A net addition of 103,000 broadband subscribers is an improvement from the fourth quarter of 2011 (ended December 31) when the company saw a net decline of 49,000 in total broadband subscribers. AT&T lost close to 615,000 classic DSL connections during the first quarter of 2012. In the fourth quarter of 2011, AT&T lost about 636,000 connections. With more people using broadband to access all sorts of bandwidth-consuming services such as Spotify, Netflix and MLB games, it is pretty clear that the classic DSL isn’t enough. The change in demand patterns is reflective of that.