Charter beats Verizon into third position in US carrier Ethernet rankings

Vertical Systems Group’s US carrier Ethernet leaderboard results for mid-2016 are as follows (in rank order based on retail port share): AT&T, Level 3, Charter (includes Time Warner Cable and Bright House), Verizon, CenturyLink, Comcast, XO, Cox and Windstream.

Port shares were calculated using the mid-year base of enterprise installations of Ethernet services in the US plus input from surveys of Ethernet providers. The leaderboard threshold is 4% or more of billable port installations.

Charter joins the leaderboard for the first time at third position, based on aggregated ports from its May 2016 acquisitions of Time Warner Cable and Bright House. At the end of 2015, Time Warner Cable was the top Cable multiple systems operators (MSO) and ranked fifth on the US leaderboard, while Charter and Bright House were in the Challenge Tier. Charter Spectrum is now the largest Cable MSO provider of retail Ethernet services.

As a result of this Leaderboard shakeup, Verizon’s mid-2016 rank drops to fourth from third in 2015 and CenturyLink moves from fourth to fifth. Additionally, XO moves into the shared seventh position ahead of Cox, which dips to eighth. In the Challenge Tier, Integra is a new entrant rising from the Market Player tier.

“The competitive balance of the Ethernet marketplace is evident, as more than 60 percent of new connections were delivered by competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) and cable MSOs during the first half of 2016,” said Rick Malone, principal of vertical systems group. “Our analysis shows a 17% annualised growth rate for US carrier Ethernet services for the full year.”

The Challenge Tier includes providers with between 1% and 4% share of the U.S. retail Ethernet market. The following four companies attained a position in the mid-2016 Challenge Tier (in alphabetical order): Cogent,Integra, Lightpath (an Altice USA brand) and Zayo.