Major US telephone companies have sunk billions into boosting or bypassing DSL by laying plenty of fiber. The expensive strategy is showing good early results as both AT&T and Verizon chalked up big gains in their U-verse and FiOS offerings even as DSL contracted.

In the US, DSL has been falling behind cable and fiber Internet links for some time and now lopes along slowly at the back of the speed pack. But two of the country's biggest DSL providers, Verizon and AT&T, have found that their efforts to move beyond simple DSL offerings are now generating excellent growth, even in the midst of a recession.

Verizon today announced its financial numbers for the first quarter of 2009, and the results were excellent for its fiber-optic FiOS system. The company's expensive fiber-to-the-home network added 298,000 new Internet customers, excellent growth considering that FiOS has only 2.8 million Internet customers in total. FiOS now has 55.5 percent more subscribers than it did a year ago, and it currently passes more than 9 million US homes.

AT&T's U-verse system added nearly the same number of customers (284,000), which brings the fiber-to-the-node system up to 1.3 million subscribers. That means AT&T is adding customers twice as fast as it did in the first quarter of 2008.

While DSL and cable are still roughly tied for subscribers in the US, cable has been growing much faster. In the middle of 2008, cable was adding three new subscribers for every one DSL picked up, and big players like AT&T and Verizon are pinning their wireline hopes on services like U-verse and FiOS. This last week's growth news suggests that the strategy has potential.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/as-dsl-shrinks-fios-and-u-verse-show-big-growth.ars

I don't like the title of this thread.

It's not a complaint about your posting here, it's a complaint about the original article (with the same title) on Ars Technica.

I read the Ars article (but didn't follow its links). There is little substantiaton for DSL being affected by the recession. Maybe people are actually upgrading (even in a recession) from DSL to cable or to FiOS or U-Verse?

The article title IS pretty lame.

A better reflection of what is happening is here:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=16357356#post16357356


Basically broadband is growing, and those offering the fastest speeds are growing fastest. I expect that as FIOS spreads with high speeds and no bandwidth caps you will see cable have to offer DOCSIS 3.0 level of service (~50 Mbps) without caps at a price less than the incredible speeds that FIOS can offer.