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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (3056)	6/18/2001 11:38:20 PM
From: ftth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 46821

re: "Can you point to some early signs? " They're coming in sooner than I expected<gg>: CT's Pipeline June 19, 2001 Vol. 2, No. 24 FEATURE STORY NCTA Cable 2001: How to Engineer Customer Stickiness "During downturns, that's the time to move ahead aggressively," Dick Green, CableLabs (http://www.cablelabs.com) president/CEO, stressed at the NCTA (http://www.ncta.com) Cable 2001 show's general session last week. "This is the time to be aggressive, especially technically." And some ops are taking up that call, particularly on the VOD front. "Even in an economic downturn, the rate of change does not slow," Cox's EVP of Operations Patrick Esser said. Both Esser and Comcast President Steve Burke agreed that 2002 is the year of VOD with both ops turning up to full boil. The Thick and Thin of Set-Tops -- Despite these aggressive video plans, when it comes to buying advanced set-tops, MSOs are definitely waiting. "Frankly it's economic. Right now the [Motorola DCT] 5000 is not economic. The 2000 is a workhorse, and customer satisfaction has soured," Kim Kelly, EVP/CFO/COO at Insight Communications said at the session. The pace of technology is clearly going to overrun any service provider's ability to deploy it, Jim McDonald, chairman/CEO of Scientific-Atlanta (http://www.sciatl.com) pointed out later at a tech seminar. In other words, just because there's all those snazzy advanced boxes out there doesn't mean that there's a business case that will have CTOs reaching for their wallets -- yet. Instead, ops are relying on the embedded set-top base and addressing McDonald's question: "What functionalities and features do you want in the future?" Today's MSOs are making a careful study of what kind of services they want to offer tomorrow, Dave Robinson, Motorola Broadband Communications Sector's (http://www.gi.com) president, agreed. He believes that as ops decide on services, they'll buy both thick and thin set-tops. The Competition Wants to Shack Up With Your Subs-- More services mean less churn and subscriber "stickiness." That makes a good case for home networking as a way for cable ops to differentiate themselves from other providers and compete on more than just price, ShareWave's (http://www.sharewave.com) Don Apruzzese, said at another NCTA tech session. But he warned, "Your competition is looking at it, and in some cases they are ahead of you." [ftth:what competition is that, Don?] "Keep the competition out of your subs' homes," Apruzzese said. "Deploy home networks ASAP. Put it out in the field. Do field trials to get processes in place." And how's this for a great reason to shake a leg on your plans to offer your subs home networking services? S-A's Samuel Russ shared this story later in the session: Russ was chatting about home networking with a man who was outside his local cable operator's service area. After hearing about the service, he told Russ, "If they deployed wireless access, I would move [into the cable operator's service area]." ------------------------- [ftth: Way to overemphasize the opinions of one person who tells you what you want to hear! Like this guy would really move just to get wireless network in his home. Now, if they were talking about FTTH, well, that'd be different!!!]