* Comcast, Cablevision, Cox, Time Warner and others see multibillion-dollar opportunity
Editor’s Note: We’d like to let you know of some changes affecting this newsletter. The final issue of the View from the Edge Newsletter will be mailed Nov. 2. On Nov. 8, you will begin to receive the new twice-weekly WAN News Alert newsletter, which mails every Wednesday and Friday. As well as bringing you headlines of the week’s service provider and carrier news and news analysis, the WAN News Alert will also bring you headlines of news surrounding the enterprise wide area networking. We thank you for reading the View from the Edge Newsletter and we hope you will enjoy the WAN News Alert.
Editor’s Note: We’d like to let you know of some changes affecting this newsletter. The final issue of the View from the Edge Newsletter will be mailed Nov. 2. On Nov. 8, you will begin to receive the new twice-weekly WAN News Alert newsletter, which mails every Wednesday and Friday. It will continue to bring you headlines of the week’s service provider and carrier news and news analysis, and will also bring you headlines of news surrounding the enterprise WAN. We thank you for reading the View from the Edge Newsletter and we hope you will enjoy the WAN News Alert.
For Comcast, it’s reportedly $3 billion to $5 billion in five to seven years.
For Cablevision, it’s $1.5 billion in two years. And for Cox, it’s $1 billion in four years.
These are revenue targets cable companies say they can achieve from selling phone, data and other services to enterprise customers, small and large. Indeed, cable multisystem operators (MSO) are increasingly investing in and targeting enterprise businesses to broaden their market and take competition with the phone companies beyond residential.
“It’s a quieter story, but the RBOCs certainly know we’re there taking business from them,” says Hyman Sukiennik, vice president and general manager of Cox Business Services in Omaha, Neb.
Cox Business Services has been in the enterprise market for eight years, but predominantly targeting small and midsize businesses. But Sukiennik says the company also has large enterprises in its sites and can offer them anything from a single POTS line to an OC-48.
Larger enterprises, however, will be a tougher nut to crack. MSOs lack the national and international footprint, and aren’t up to the task of guaranteeing the stringent service-level agreements (SLA) large enterprises require, observers say.
“SLAs get back to the issue of how much of the network they own,” says Maribel Lopez, a vice president at Forrester Research.
As a result, Lopez believes aforementioned revenue targets are “aggressive.”
