Cable VoIP
Cable VoIP is coming of age in
2007. Cable VoIP jumped by 900-percent in sales from
2003 to 2004 according to Infonetics Research. Most
of the jump in cable VoIP sales in 2004 were from vendors
Time Warner and Cablevision. New cable VoIP players
have stepped up recently, however, and are aggressively
marketing their cable VoIP services in their particular
markets.
On of the biggest players is
Cox Communications, touted as the third largest cable
provider in the nation is getting in on the cable VoIP
action as well. Cox has achieved a 40-percent market
penetration with cable VoIP in its Omaha, Nebraska and
Orange County, California markets. Cox has added VoIP
service to its traditional cable telephone service and
is now the 11th largest telecommunications company in
the nation.
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Time
Warner Cable is adding 10,000 new VoIP subscribers
per week and Cablevision is adding 1000 subscribers
per day as the hot market is just getting started.
Cable giant Comcast was test marketing cable VoIP
service in three markets in 2004 and will market
cable VoIP to 15 million homes by the end of 2005.
In 2004, only 2-percent of the households with
cable were signed up for cable VoIP service, but
this figure is expected to exceed 15-percent by
the end of 2007.
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Cable providers nearly doubled
their spending on network equipment last year, paying
a whopping $123 million on media gateways, media servers,
soft-switches, voice application servers and other gear.
This is good news for networking companies like Cisco,
Lucent and Nortel, which are already heavily invested
in the VoIP market.
Time Warner Cable decided to
take a marketing risk in the hometown of SBC Communications
and started marketing their cable VoIP services in order
to drive cable TV and high-speed Internet sales in the
San Antonio, Texas market. According to Sam Howe, senior
vice president of marketing for VoIP at Time Warner,
the results for getting people to switch from telephone
wire to cable have been "extraordinary". Selling
cable VoIP first, and then cable television and high-speed
cable next had never been done before, but the success
rate was phenomenal.
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of cable VoIP may take a great deal of market share away
from Vonage, the nation's largest VoIP service provicer,
which runs primarily through DSL channels. The cable companies
have an advantage in that they can control the throughput
speeds and quality of service requirements for cable VoIP
much easier than many upstart VoIP companies can. The
companies selling cable VoIP service have done an excellent
job in making cable telephone service look just like traditional
telephone service to the consumers. This has been a major
selling point according to many customer satisfaction
surveys.
The majority of cable companies
also offer emergency 911 service, battery backup and
professional installation. Currently, many VoIP over
DSL service providers do not offer full e911 service
to all households, (though this is expected to change
because of a ruling by the FCC that all providers must
be e911 compliant by September, 2005). Cable VoIP is
coming of age for one additional reason, which is that
a large number of consumers have acquired a generalized
distaste for the telephone companies and would like
a viable alternative to their services.
Cable VoIP is not only coming
of age, but its here to stay for a very long time. And
you can believe that the other telecommunications companies
are taking note.
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