Comcast winning broadband scrum vs. telcos

Comcast continues to add broadband Internet subscribers as telecom giants like AT&T and Verizon trail.

Comcast's third quarter earnings Wednesday tell the tale of a company weathering the downturn pretty well--but not well enough to excite Wall Street. Comcast reported net income of $771 million, or 26 cents a share, on revenue of $8.55 billion, up 10 percent from a year ago. Comcast reaffirmed that operating cash flow would growth 8 percent to 10 percent in 2008.

Here's the tale of the broadband tape:

• Comcast added 382,000 high-speed Internet subscribers in the third quarter.
• Verizon added 225,000 FiOS Internet subscribers.
• AT&T added 148,000 broadband connections.

Add it up and AT&T and Verizon combined can't hang with Comcast. More notable is that both AT&T and Verizon are coming off a smaller base and have doubled down on wireless.

So what's Comcast's secret sauce? Apparently it's phone service. Comcast is adding voice customers at a rapid clip. The cable giant added 483,000 voice customers in the third quarter. Comcast's phone revenue increased 44 percent to $690 million in the third quarter.

On a conference call with analysts, Comcast executives noted that the phone service is the best value that the company has. Comcast appears to be using that voice services as a way to sell other services. However, Comcast also added that it is seeing more competition from AT&T and Verizon so the broadband war is far from over.