Broadband war gets bloodier

[Commentary] Judging from the earnings announcements from Comcast, Verizon and AT&T, adding new broadband customers is getting more tough as many people already subscribe to either cable or DSL. As a result, cable operators and phone companies are battling each other head to head to steal customers from one another. With the economy in trouble and 90 percent of active Internet users connecting via broadband, these companies are going to rely more heavily on promotional pricing to entice customers to switch. Media Metrics analyst Laura Martin says the fairly miserable subscriber numbers from AT&T and Verizon suggest that cable is stealing a share of the broadband market from DSL. The upshot, she thinks, is that DSL will become the equivalent of a narrowband service over the next five years -- that is, it will become obsolete.