* News from the National Cable and Telecommunications Association show
The National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA) held its annual trade show (also known as “The Cable Show”) last week in Las Vegas and today, we’d like to offer a few convergence-related highlights.
* Senior execs of cable companies at the show reiterated their commitment to expand their enterprise market share by offering business bundles that include voice, video, and data services.
* Sprint announced it is expanding its partnership with cable operators to help reach the cable company’s small business customers with VoIP services for enterprises that need one to 12 trunk lines of unlimited local and long distance service. According to a prepared statement, the standard service features include rotary hunting, caller ID to a deskset or PC, call waiting/call forwarding, etc.; business-class directory listings; business-class voicemail including call attendant, find me follow me, voicemail to e-mail and other enhanced features; plus support for business 911 services.
Sprint will also offer cable companies marketing support, including help to train sales and support staff. Sprint already provides consumer and enterprise voice services to Time Warner Cable and Suddenlink Communications; it will also now partner with Baja Broadband and Millennium Digital to offer VoIP services. Sprint launched its VoIP wholesale offering in December 2003 and now provides VoIP services to 14 cable companies supporting more than 1.7 million residential customers.
* Cable companies are moving to deploy switched digital video (SDV) this year and next year will begin to deploy DOCSIS 3.0. By installing SDV, cable companies will free additional broadband capacity in their network. By deploying DOCSIS 3.0 they will be able to provide connection speeds of up to 160Mbps while reducing costs by an estimated 70% from today’s cost.
Our analysis: While cable companies still have a long way to go to catch with the phone companies with business voice services, they will surely increase competition for high speed enterprise data services over the next year. And by bundling voice and data together with attractive features and prices, cable companies will have an opportunity to turn up competitive heat in the enterprise market.
