Time Warner had 220,000 VoIP customers at end of 2004, and is adding 10,000 every week. Cablevision is adding 7000 a day. Others like Cox have achieved nearly 40% penetration in original test markets like Omaha and Orange County. The trends are that these companies will continue to attract more users.
“I think Time Warner and Cablevision can take the lead in VoIP from Vonage this year,” Teresa Mastrangelo, principal analyst with Broadbandtrends.com told Telephony. “The cable companies are being very smart in making their VoIP look like traditional phone service so that customers don’t have to make any extra effort to change services.”
Reason, in my opinion is that they are calling their VoIP service “digital phone” and not mucking around with geek phrases like VoIP. It is simple advertising message with last mile access to the network. They can simply say – we are better and cheaper than say Verizon, SBC or BellSouth. Interestingly, in some markets Cable guys are replacing even the DSL connections into the home and that cannot be a good thing for the phone companies!
I have Cox and I was wondering the digital telephone service that I have which acts just like a regular phone, and works when broadband is down is considered a VOIP add. Lot of the data from cable companies need to be broken out. The phone service from them is not truly VoIP. What I mean is that it is not like Vonage or 8×8 etc.
I think you have an older type of cable phone service. the ones i mentioned are purely voip services. cox hasn’t rolled out voip based services in its entire network.