A short report by telecom analysts at investment firm UBS, coincident with the NCTA show in San Francisco this week, says voice over IP is proving to be a hot product for cable operators with uptake higher than many had expected.
Combined with existing TDM offerings, cable acquisition of telephone customers has reached 50 percent in some locations.
According to the report, by UBS analysts John Hodulik and Gaurav Jaitly, Cablevision Systems Corp. announced it had 350,000 VoIP customers on March 15. The report went on to say that Cablevision expects to offer local number portability to its customers in May, “which … will lead to a further uptick in demand.”
UBS also said Time Warner Cable, a division of Time Warner, has garnered 18 percent of basic subscribers for voice in it first VoIP market, Portland, Me., which launched two years ago.
Also seeing good results from VoIP, the report says, is Cox Communications Inc., which has won more than 50 percent of telephone subscribers in its markets in Orange County, Calif., and Omaha, Neb. The Orange County deployment, launched in 1997, already had substantial uptake for TDM voice.
According to the UBS report, “cable operators all stressed that customer uptake of VoIP was very consistent across markets.” Cox, it says, had 1.3 million phone customers, or 21 percent of its available homes, in 12 circuit-switched and five VoIP markets as of the end of 2004.
