Cablecos, What Are You Waiting For?

April 19, 2004

Word has it that DSL is fast catching up to cable in terms of market penetration. Perhaps as early as a few months ago, estimates where that cable users trumped dsl users by almost 2 to 1. Now the gap has narrowed considerably thanks to marketing efforts, price breaks, and quality improvements undertaken by the telcos as of late.

The telcos have one other advantage over cable companies, communications. The internet has much closer synergies to telecommunications than it does to TV channels. After all, the internet was invented by a telco. And telcos have done a much better job bundling their services with dsl, than cable companies have done with cable modem.

Now that voip is gaining rapid acceptance, the telcos seem much better positioned to offer this new service. AT&T recently announced their voip product and who knows, Verizon may not be far behind. Cable companies, on the other hand seem to be standing still. The only message they seem to be sending is the old “cable is faster than dsl”. Well,
That’s not enough.

Sure I can get fast cable service and then subscribe to one of the independent voip providers out there. But I’d rather see a simple cable/voip plan, competitively priced from my cable company. You want to spend the cash and do it from scratch, go for it. You want to buy out one of the existing voip providers and integrate it with your business, that’s fine too. But then again maybe you just enjoy watching the telcos rob your market share.