e delivery of television and pay-per-view; they want to provide a broad spectrum of interactive, two-way services that will allow them to compete head-to-head with the telephony industry. To a large degree, they are succeeding. The challenges they face, however, are daunting. Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. Access Technologies Chapter 6 According to the Leichtman Research Group, the 20 largest cable and DSL providers in the United States, which represent approximately 95 percent of the market, enjoyed record net subscriber additions in the third quarter of 2004. Combined net adds for the quarter totaled over 2.3 million subscribers-a not insignificant figure. The largest broad- band providers now account for over 30.9 million high-speed Internet subscribers, with cable delivering service to 18.8 million broadband subs and DSL providing service to just over 12 million. The top cable broadband providers retain a 6.6 million subscriber advantage over DSL, with a 61 percent share of the total market. In 2004, from the end of third quarter 2003 to the end of third quarter 2004, cable and DSL added 8.3 million net subscribers. Playing in the Broadband Unlike the telephone industry that began its colorful life under the scrutiny of a small number of like-minded individuals (Alexander Graham Bell and Theodore Vail, among others), the cable industry came about thanks to the combined efforts of hundreds of innovators, each building on Parson's original concept. As a consequence, the industry, while enormous, is in many ways fragmented. Powerful industry leaders like John Malone and Gerald Levine were able to exert "Tito-like" pow- ers to unite the many companies, turning a loosely cobbled-together col- lection of players into cohesive, powerful corporations with a shared vision of what they were capable of accomplishing. Today, the cab