Report: Cablecos Target Small Business Phone Market

The top 20 cable operators are looking to get a piece of the small business phone market, a move that could cost incumbent phone companies more than $4 billion over the next five years, according to a new market research report from Insight Research Corp.

Incumbent phone companies are expected to lose more than 1.5 million small business phone lines to cable competitors by the close of this year and nearly 10 million small business phone lines over the next five years, according to the study.

The report is called, “Cable Telephony: The Threat to Small Enterprise ILEC Markets 2007-2012.”

On a per-customer basis, providing a small business with data and voice services can generate three to four times the revenue of the residential customer buying a bundle of voice, data and video services, which makes for fierce competition, Insight said.

“Recent announcements by Comcast and Time Warner Cable make it plain that the small enterprise is the next battleground in the cable versus phone company fight,” said Robert Rosenberg, president of Insight. “We looked at the 20 largest cable operators that together have within their operating footprints about 6.5 million out of more than 7 million small businesses in the U.S. MSOs such as Comcast, Cox and CableVision have the offers and the reach, and they are going to have a definitive impact on phone companies’ bottom line over the next few years.”

Insight Research Corp. www.insight-corp.com

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