WASHINGTON-For every three new wireless subscribers there is one less wireline subscriber, said Stephen Pociask, president of TeleNomic Research L.L.C.
“These phones do the same thing as your wired phone and probably more because I can make a call from down the block and the quality of service made from a wireline phone from down the block is zero,” said Pociask.
Pociask made his statements at a BellSouth Corp. press briefing on Aug. 6 meant to show that incumbent local exchange carriers are losing market share even if the competitive local exchange carrier industry appears to be tanking.
“Everybody you talk to, whether you read it in the press or we talk to people on the Hill, or talk to people at the [Federal Communications Commission], they think in terms of market share. They think in terms of how much have you lost? They think in terms of the number of access lines. For us to change the paradigm, we have to have a more realistic appreciation of what the market in fact is,” said Herschel L. Abbott Jr., BellSouth’s vice president of governmental affairs.
A new study highlighting this paradigm was unveiled at the press conference. The new study says ILECs have less than 60 percent of the local market. AT&T Corp. was declared to be a nondominant carrier in the long-distance market when it had only 60 percent of that market, said Pociask, the study’s author.
This new paradigm would include counting wireless as competition for wireline even if customers are not officially “cutting the cord.”
Abbott, who recently moved from Louisiana, said the Louisiana market is illustrative of what is happening in BellSouth’s territory. The growth for second lines has remained flat for the last two years while wireless subscribers have grown from 50,000 to 200,000 during the same period, he said.
The study reports different results than previous local competition studies-including those conducted by the FCC-because those only count fixed-wireless connections instead of all wireless, according to the study.
