Record increase in broadband subscribers, San Diego on top
According to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required). The numbers aren't adding up for me for the total but it is somewhere between 22M and 25M. That's pretty amazing considering there were only 10.7M broadband subscribers at the end of 2001. When you experience broadband at work or in your favorite cafe (using a WiFi connection like Tmobile's in Starbucks across the country) it is very, very hard to go back to dial-up. Our only requirement when we moved to our new house was that our Comcast broadband cable be up and running no later than 24 hours!
Americans hooked up to faster Internet connections at a record pace in 2003, with the twenty largest U.S. cable and digital-subscriber-line providers adding a combined 7.4 million high-speed Internet subscribers during the year, according to Leichtman Research Group. Customers continued to show their preference for cable over DSL as the means of high-speed hookup: At the end of 2003, the top cable providers held 63% of the overall market and accounted for over 15.5 million subscribers, compared with 9.1 million for DSL.
And, according to this BizReport story San Diego is the first city to have more broadband users than dial-up, with San Francisco/Oakland lagging behind at 44%. Silicon Valley didn't make it to the list. And in comparison Albuquerque/Santa Fe was at the lowest level with only 24% connecting via broadband.
Reviewing the top US markets with broadband connectivity, comScore finds that in San Diego, more Net users are making broadband connections (52%) than narrowband while in Boston the split is 50% broadband, 50% narrowband. Meanwhile, in New York and Providence, RI, just under 50% of Net users are using high-speed.