Cox

Cox Prevails Over Verizon VoIP Patent Suit

Bernie — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 00:06:36 -0400

A Virginia court ruled in Cox’s favor over Verizon in a patent dispute over VoIP technology. Verizon was hoping to repeat a VoIP patent victory over Vonage, which resulted in a $117 million settlement. No such luck with Cox. "We remain deeply committed to providing our customers high-quality phone service at a great value, and look forward to competing vigorously with Verizon in the marketplace, not the courtroom," the company said in an e-mailed statement to Reuters. Verizon is pursuing a similar patent infringement suit with Charter. Looks like Charter’s defense just got a little stronger, and Cablevision and Time Warner Cable have a little less VoIP patent issues to worry about.

Cox Launches Online Storage and Backup Service

Bernie — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 11:43:34 -0400

Cox and Casero Inc. announced the launch of Cox’s Media Store and Share, an online file storage, back-up, and sharing service. The product is based on Casero’s Personal Media Suite product. "Our customers have told us that just storing their content was not
enough. We needed a solution to provide sharing and storage together in an easy to use application," said Seth Hogan, Vice President of Data Product Management for Cox in a Casero company statement. According to Casero, Cox will include 5GB of space for its Premium and Preferred high-speed Internet customers, (enough for approximately 5000 photos, 1000 songs or six full-length movies), customized file sharing, automatic scheduling of content backup, access to their online files from any computer connected to the Internet.

Cox: We’ll Take 20% Market Share for Wireless

Bernie — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 15:03:06 -0400

In a revealing presentation, Cox President Patrick Esser told the Progress and Freedom Foundation's annual tech policy summit in Aspen, Colorado that they intend to capture 20% market share for wireless service. Rather than join the Clearwire alliance like their other cable brethren, Cox is going it alone through its recent acquisition of 700 MHz spectrum. As reported by PC Magazine, Esser says he “…won't divulge too many secrets here, but we'll focus on providing simple calling plans, integrating all our services into one device with a consistent cross-platform interface; and making our content and applications mobile.”

Pretty bold comments considering the hyper-competitive marketplace for wireless. Achieving 20% penetration would be very impressive, especially for a company with no wireless experience. But Cox competitors shouldn’t take them lightly. They’ve been quite successful in capturing significant voice business from their telco competitors, and at one point, they had no experience with voice either. The pending move into wireless by the cable industry will be interesting to watch. They failed miserably with Pivot Wireless. But to their credit, they’re marching forward with a wireless act two. When and if they get it going, it will open up a new front in the bundling war between telco and cable. PC Magazine summed it up nicely with this Esser quote, “Frankly, we're in a street fight today for customers in every single aspect of our business – from the Bells and the satellite guys, to the wireless carriers.” Happy hunting.

Cox Raising Broadband Pricing

Bernie — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 10:24:17 -0400

Cox is apparently ignoring the recent Pew Internet research results which suggested that broadband pricing is still too high. According to BroadbandReports.com, Cox is raising their broadband pricing for many of their broadband tiers in several markets. Apparently, their "economy" tier will rise to $19.95 from $16.95 and their "value" tier to $29.95 from $26.95. Their “preferred” and “premiere” tiers are also rising to $44.95 and $59.95 respectively. These identified prices include bundle discounts for taking video. The Pew Research Center recently released their 2008 Home Broadband Adoption Study, in which one of the finding suggested that high prices for broadband is impeding higher broadband penetration rates for the U.S. The Pew results indicate growth in broadband penetration is relatively flat and “35% of dial-up users say that the price of broadband service would have to fall,” in order for them to give up dial up for broadband.

Of course that’s one opinion in the broadband pricing debate. Broadband carriers tend to have a different perspective, especially as the appetite for bandwidth continues to climb. Satisfying that growing subscriber appetite, while also holding the line on price is a challenge, they say. If the trend continues where broadband consumption continues to grow at a rapid pace, and there’s no indication it won’t, broadband carriers will continue to explore raising prices. Maybe even at the expense of slowing penetration growth. How are you coping with finding the right balance between price and penetration?

RCN to Join DOCSIS 3.0 Club

Bernie — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 00:08:20 -0400

RCN is looking to wideband to keep up with its competitors, which include Comcast, Time Warner, and Verizon. RCN is a scrappy overbuilder, and is often the third triple play option in many Northeast markets including Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. Its competitors have announced the move to DOCSIS 3.0, or in Verizon’s case, utilize FTTH. Speaking from a bandwidth perspective, RCN CEO Peter Aquino is quoted in a Light Reading article as saying, “We'll go as high as anyone else." RCN's move to wideband is being facilitated by reclamation of analog spectrum, as they shift to an all digital cable platform. That reclamation will take some time and RCN says that DOCSIS 3.0 and the 50 Mbps speeds it will bring won’t happen until late 2009. Given that Comcast, Time Warner, and Verizon are moving considerably faster to that bogey, will RCN’s plan be too little, too late? Or is the broadband escalation strategy being pursued by all of these players overkill?

Cox and Nortel Partner for Business Market

Bernie — Mon, 19 May 2008 23:38:44 -0400

Cox and Nortel announced a partnership that will allow their respective sales organizations to market each others products and services. The new product solutions which include Nortel’s Business Communication Manager platform, will be packaged under the Cox Business brand. Cox Business provides communications services to business customers in 18 markets across the U.S., including small businesses, multi-location enterprises, regional healthcare providers and federal, state and local government organizations.

R.I.P. Pivot Wireless

Bernie — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 02:31:14 -0400

It’s official. Pivot Wireless, the wireless joint venture between Sprint and the cable industry is dead. The three major cable partners, who included Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Cox, have decided to move on. Sprint announced back in October that it would stop marketing Pivot. All existing Pivot wireless subscribers will migrate over to Sprint. There are no firm numbers on exactly how many subscribers the venture had obtained. All joint venture participants had previously complained about Pivot’s provisioning and integration complexities. It almost seems that it was doomed from the start.

The real question is what’s next for the cable industry in regards to wireless? They are sitting on a “boatload” of spectrum obtained from recent AWS and 700 MHz (Cox is the lone national cable provider with 700 MHz) auctions. In some regards, Pivot was almost a distraction. With it removed from the equation, the cable industry may start moving more aggressively on a true facilities based wireless platform. Gigaom.com is reporting that Comcast has hired a seasoned wireless executive to start building the framework for their own wireless launch. There has also been speculation that the cable industry was interested in investing in Sprint’s WiMAX play, Xohm. That seems highly unlikely now, given the Pivot blow up. Whatever the case, the cable industry needs to move fast on their wireless strategy. If they don’t, they may arrive to the wireless party too late (which may already be the case), and spend billions on building a nationwide wireless network, only to find out that subscribers are quite content with their current wireless provider.

700 MHz Results: Usual Suspects with a Twist

Bernie — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 09:16:31 -0400

The FCC released results from the 700 MHZ auction and it looks like the pre-release consensus was right. Verizon Wireless and AT&T were the big winners, with Verizon gaining a national 700 MHz footprint. They both bid a combined $16.3 billion, with AT&T bidding $6.64 billion for 227 B-block licenses and Verizon Wireless bidding $9.63 billion for the large C-block regional licenses. An additional 99 bidders won 754 licenses, including familiar names like Echostar (DISH Networks) and Cox. The outcome of the auction did not produce a viable national wireless competitor, as many had hoped, but there are some interesting twists.

Echostar bid $711 million for 168 E-block licenses, which covers a large portion of the U.S. Cox bid close to $305 million for 22 licenses in the A and B blocks. Their licenses will include areas of California, Virginia, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Arkansas, Kansas and Oklahoma. These two winners will probably be the most interesting to watch from a competitive angle. Echostar now has a conceivable way to offer broadband, although speculation is that they have their eyes on mobile video, which the E-block spectrum is much better suited for. Among smaller service providers, CenturyTel won 69 B-block licenses for $149 million, raising the potential for CenturyTel to launch its own wireless service. Several tier 3 carriers won licenses including Horry Telephone of South Carolina, Pioneer Telephone in Oklahoma, and PVT Networks in New Mexico. While the auction failed to bring a competitor to the national stage, and may have fallen somewhat short from an overall competitive standpoint, it did empower several entrants into the wireless space. Time will tell whether those entrants can actually have a competitive impact in their respective territories, but it will be interesting to observe over the coming months and years.

Charter and Cox Collaborate on Business Market

Bernie — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 07:58:27 -0400

It’s no secret that the cable industry sees the small/medium business and enterprise sectors as their next big growth engine. Continuing to grow revenue generating units in the consumer triple play sector is nice, but the growth hungry cable industry realizes that won’t be enough to satisfy shareholders and Wall Street. So it’s no surprise to see collaborative efforts like the one announced by Charter and Cox concerning fiber connectivity links. The two large MSOs have agreed to connect each others markets through fiber rings in their Nevada markets of Reno and Las Vegas. Similar links are taking place in California, between Orange County and Los Angeles. Cox and Charter have previously relied on telecom carriers to establish connectivity between markets.

The collaborative effort will target enterprise customers who have multiple locations, with Ethernet and IP transport services. “This agreement brings a competitive choice to businesses that need to communicate with locations in other key commerce hubs in the western U.S.,” said Jim McGann, vice president and general manager, Charter Business. Cox has been quite active with their Ethernet solutions, and now ranks as the fourth largest provider of Ethernet services in the country. By partnering with Charter, they are able to expand services beyond their traditional footprint. Expect to see more collaborative efforts like this among cable MSOs, as they continue to try to compete with well entrenched telecom service providers, who have long viewed the business communications sector and the billions of revenue it generates as their own.

Cox Achieves 62% Penetration for Bundling

Bernie — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 09:09:52 -0500

Cox announced that 62% of their customers subscribe to at least two bundled services, and 30% subscribe to at least three services. Compare that with AT&T, who by our estimation, has about a 45% penetration for at least two bundled services. Verizon is a little more difficult to compare with because they really have two classes of residential subscribers – those with FiOS access and those without. Here are Cox’s reported subscriber counts with corresponding year over year growth rates:

5.96 million total residential customer relationships; 1.6% growth
3.7 million bundled customers; 9.0% growth
2.38 million telephone subscribers; 17.7% growth
3.7 million high-speed Internet subscribers; 11.3% growth
3.1 million digital cable subscribers; 10.8% growth
557,000 “non-video” residential customers; 24.5% growth

Cox has always been seen as a leader in the MSO industry for bundling. They were bundling voice service using traditional circuit switched service (as opposed to today’s cable VoIP service) long before other cable companies got in on the act. Part of the reason they can brag about these impressive bundling penetration figures is because they have been at it longer than probably any other national MSO or telecom carrier. Cox is projecting over 4 million bundled customers in 2008.