TORONTO – Delighted with their early business successes, major cable operators are stepping up their efforts to capture sizable chunks of the commercial telecom services market and recruit larger companies.
Appearing at the SCTE Canadian Summit here earlier this week, top engineering executives of four leading Canadian and U.S. MSOs said they will keep pouring resources into business services initiatives in 2012, after experiencing strong growth over the last few years. In particular, they are investing more heavily in technologies, equipment, products and services for mid-sized and larger companies after making great headway with smaller firms.
For example, Comcast has just started to roll out a new hosted PBX service, known as Comcast Business Voice Edge, for firms with 50 to 250 employees in its regions. The cloud-based business voice service is making its debut less than a year after the largest U.S. MSO began offering Metro Ethernet data service throughout its footprint, as part of its new pitch to mid-sized companies.
“Now we’re really ramping with Metro Ethernet,” said Ray Celona, senior vice president of planning and implementation for Comcast’s national engineering and technical operations unit. “We really believe that it’ll take us to the next level.” Comcast closed out last year with about $1.8 billion (U.S.) in commercial revenues, up more than 40% from its 2010 total.
Dermot O’Carroll, senior vice president of access networks for Rogers Communications, said Rogers has made headway with business customers by building fiber extensions, rolling out Ethernet service and providing better customer service and stronger service guarantees. Although the MSO struggled with the migration of Sprint Canada customers to its HFC network several years ago, he said the company’s heavy investments in its main network are now paying off.
“When customers get on our networks, they love us,” O’Carroll said. “Uniformly, our customers come back to us.”
Jim Ludington, executive vice president of Time Warner Cable, said TWC is reaping healthy dividends from its three-stage strategy of expanding its commercial services reach. The strategy – which he termed “more to same,” “same to more” and “more to more” – has consisted of offering additional services to the same group of commercial customers, extending those same services to a bigger group of customers and now offering more services to an even bigger group of prospects.
Jeff Chen, senior vice president of advanced technology for Bright House Networks, said his company has prospered by extending dedicated fiber lines and offering EPON technology to firms. Bright House is now focusing on developing specialized video services for hotels in its prime Florida markets, as is Time Warner Cable in its markets.
Celona said Comcast, seeking to boost its share of the enterprise market, is looking at ways to team up with other cable operators to serve large firms operating in the markets of different cable operators. “We see opportunities across MSOs that we can collectively work on,” he said. In addition, he said Comcast is seeking to develop more cloud-based services like its new hosted PBX service.
Speaking on a separate panel here this week, two CableLabs officials detailed the organization’s efforts to craft new technical standards designed to aid the industry’s commercial services drive. The latest standard, known as DOCSIS Provisioning of EPON (or DPoE), calls for using DOCSIS network provisioning to deliver EPON technology over fiber lines. CableLabs plans to begin testing DPoE products from equipment vendors for interoperability sometime this summer.
Alan Breznick is a Toronto-based senior analyst at Heavy Reading, part of the Light Reading Communications Network. He covered the SCTE Canadian Summit this week for Cartt.ca.
The SCTE Canadian Summit sessions were very well-attended. Photo courtesy SCTE.
