Cablecom: Strong growth in the digital television sector

Cablecom achieved a respectable annual result in 2008. Revenue increased by 4.8 percent year-on-year to CHF 1.098 billion. All digital services recorded growing customer numbers. The fastest growth continued to be in digital television, which recorded an increase of 37.2 percent to 347,000 customers in 2008.
As expected, the number of customers who only use analog TV continued to fall. The number of Internet customers increased by 6.8 percent compared to the previous year to 486,000, writes Cablecom in a press release on Tuesday. With around 309,000 customers, which corresponds to an increase of 7.3 percent, customers were also gained in the telephony segment. In the television segment, the number of customers remained constant at over 1.5 million.

Continuous network expansion
Around 25,000 households were upgraded for interactive digital services such as broadband Internet, fixed-line telephony and digital television in 2008. In 2009, the network expansion is to be consistently driven forward and the number of households in two-way networks is to be further increased, the report continues.
Parallel to network modernization, the bandwidth of the existing two-way networks is being continuously expanded. At the end of 2008, over 770,000 households had higher bandwidths - a prerequisite for digital television. 2009 will also see the introduction of the new Docsis 3.0 transmission standard with surfing speeds of more than 100 megabits per second.