Consolidated landline leak slows to drip

As other telcos continue to report mounting landline losses, that troubling trend appears to be slowing for Mattoon, Ill.-based Consolidated Communications. The rural telco’s CEO said its recipe for success in that department has to do with its success in selling bundled services.

Consolidated Communications, which operates in parts of Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Texas and has been rumored in the past year to be a possible acquisition target in the rapidly consolidating sector, this week reported second-quarter earnings that included losses of about 2400 access lines in its ILEC markets. That amounts to just 1% of its total 242,282 ILEC lines.

“This brought our line-loss rate for the last 12 months down to 4.8% compared to an 8% rate at this time last year, and this is the lowest rate we've had since the end of 2007,” said Bob Currey, president and CEO of Consolidated.

Currey called the improved loss rate “one of the best in the industry” and added that attractively priced service bundles combined with solid customer service have been the keys to its improvement.

Currey said Consolidated also added about 1300 DSL Internet customers during the second quarter and about 1200 IPTV customers, both figures somewhat lower than in previous quarters.

Consolidated’s numbers stood out during a week when other telcos such as CenturyLink, Frontier Communications and Windstream Communications reported increased rate of access line loss. Another smaller telco, Cincinnati Bell, reported 9600 lines lost during the second quarter, slightly higher sequentially but actually an improvement over the same quarter last year. Cincinnati Bell also reported a loss of 1400 DSL Internet subscribers but a gain of 2800 fiber-to-the-home accounts.

Typically, access line loss has been slower for small telcos because they don’t face as much competition, so their customers don’t have many choices when considering a switch. However, Consolidated does see cable TV companies and other service providers as competition in some of its markets. The company also operates as a CLEC itself in some markets and has almost 74,000 CLEC access lines. Its rate of line loss in it CLEC markets over the past year has been about 2.3%.