note that Mediacom from the Greenberg's list --
wants to provide cable telephony, learned thru a trial it cannot provide cable telephony without assistance, and has a current RFP seeking a partner with switching and back office capability):
cedmagazine.com
CED assembled its annual virtual roundtable to explore how these issues are being handled today and what’s on the drawing board for 2004. Joining CED Editorial Director Roger Brown and CED Editor Jeff Baumgartner on the call were Charter Communications Senior Vice President of Engineering Wayne Davis; Comcast Cable CTO David Fellows; Cox Communications CTO and Senior Vice President, Engineering Chris Bowick; and Mediacom Communications Senior Vice President of Technology Joe Van Loan. CED held a separate call with Time Warner Cable Executive Vice President, Advanced Technologies Mike LaJoie, whose comments were inserted into the following edited transcript:
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CED: The VoIP discussion has changed over the last 12 months. Last year there was lots of talk about trials, but now it’s about deployments. Does that mean the technical and operational issues of VoIP have been solved?
Bowick (Cox): I think what has changed in the last year is that all of us have been really, really focused on it. I’m talking about for the last year to a year-and-a-half (focusing on it) in our labs, working the bugs, getting the bug fixes and working that level of detail with our vendors, doing the systems integration amongst all of the various servers and the PacketCable architecture and just working out the kinks in those interfaces, that has really been the lion’s share of the effort in the last year.
I think we’ve progressed in leaps and bounds in the last year working those issues. And now the only real issue or question as we proceed is how scalable is the architecture? That’s because we’ve just never done it before. That’s a little bit of a concern going forward.
Van Loan (Mediacom): I guess part of our philosophy is never be first or last, and certainly with telephony that’s probably a good one. We had a technical trial that we started about a year ago, and it was a good learning experience. Basically we used our CMTSs and integrated MTAs to provide connectivity to a Class 5 switch with a GR-303 interface and a bridge. We learned, one, we can do it and make it work, and, two, for us to take a brick and mortar approach by starting fresh probably doesn’t make sense.
We currently have an RFP out in which we’re seeking a partner that could provide all the switching and back office capability. We think that by next year we will be deploying commercial Voice- over-IP telephony in a couple of markets at least.
Fellows (Comcast): We’re more like Cox. We’ve got a circuit-switched business out there. Again, we reiterated [in the third quarter conference call] that it’s a business that is making money. One of the reasons that it’s making money is that a year ago, in merger time, we said, “Let’s just cool it for a while on telephony, and go back and fix our video business, fix our high-speed data business, and then get back to telephony.”
We’ve done enough work now in understanding the circuit-switch business that we own, and exploring the Voice-over-IP options that we are now convinced that this is a good market where we can make money. Going from this year, where we’ve been in one market, we’re going to three markets next year, with each market (having slightly) different characteristics. Then we’ll look to scale the business by the end of 2005.
LaJoie (Time Warner): We plan to be in three to four markets by the end of this year, and most of our other markets throughout 2004. We’re in one division currently: Portland, Maine.
Davis (Charter): We’ll expand two additional [VoIP] markets in ’04. We have an RFP that will hit the street [in November] for the switch in those additional markets. It’s not a market-specific RFP, but more of an architecture RFP. |
