Cable Finally Finding Its Voice
IP Telephony and Multimedia Capture National Show Spotlight in New Orleans
JUNE 01, 2004
By Michael Harris, President, Kinetic Strategies, and Publisher, Cable Datacom News
cabledatacomnews.com
Anyone who had the misfortune of attending the 2002 Western Show -- ineptly dubbed Broadband Plus -- had the opportunity to experience cable industry enthusiasm at rock-bottom. By comparison, the cable crowd was downright buoyant on the bayou at the 2004 National Show, held May 3-5 in New Orleans. The day before the show, dark rain clouds cleared over the Crescent City, giving way to three sunny, temperate and humidity-free days on the Mississippi River. This meteorological miracle proved the perfect metaphor for cable operator executives who see clear skies ahead for the industry. Even in cable, hope springs eternal.
With commercial IP telephony rollouts now underway at Cablevision Systems, Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications and Charter Communications, voice over IP (VoIP) topped the National Show agenda, along with emerging PacketCable Multimedia technology.
Even though VoIP deployments have started, MSO executives say 2004 remains a year for operational readiness and infrastructure development, paving the way for rapid subscriber growth in 2005. While operators and vendors remain rightly obsessed with mastering the basics of the VoIP business, players are also starting to think about key issues on the horizon: mobile telephone service integration, enhanced voice feature support, MSO network interconnection and back office issues.
"2004 is about [VoIP] operational readiness, not subscriber additions. It's about setting the stage to scale," said Thomas Cullen, senior vice president of advanced services and business development for Charter.
In an effort to grab a piece of the cable IP communications pie, a long list of service providers were on hand in New Orleans to sell outsource solutions to MSOs. Blue-chip players like Sprint, Level3 Communications and Lucent Technologies pitched operator VoIP partnerships, as did a long list of upstarts, such as Net2Phone, 8x8, Vonage, PointOne and Volo.
Not surprisingly, executives at these companies were adamant that rather than reinventing the wheel, MSOs should partner with established carriers to accelerate their time-to-market in VoIP.
Myrle McNeil, vice president of VoIP at Level3, challenged MSOs to focus on DOCSIS and PacketCable network operations and VoIP feature development, rather than the mastering of complex PSTN interconnection and regulatory issues. McNeil noted that Level3 already has 1.3 million local trunks installed reaching 90% of the U.S. population. "MSOs can interconnect with us just with an IP address," McNeil said, contrasting the approach to the onerous interconnection challenges that MSOs face with incumbent local exchange carriers (LECs) by going it alone.
"Try turning up local trunks with the LECs. They're not going to help you," McNeil said.
On the heels of a major VoIP service partnership win with Time Warner, executives from Sprint were singing a similar tune.
Noting that Sprint has more than 8 million local telephone lines and 20 million PCS wireless lines in service, Mark Chall, Sprint's director of service delivery for cable solutions, encouraged MSOs to partner with established carriers to accelerate their VoIP deployments. "We bring a huge scale," said Chall. By comparison, he said, "MSOs face a steep curve to get to scale."
That said, most MSOs have balked at paying up to $15 per line per month for PSTN termination, long distance, regulatory and back-office support, the price that Time Warner is rumored to be paying Sprint. Chall sees it differently. "Even in three years, it will be difficult for their cost structure to get under our price," he said. |
