Cablecos Ready Their Organizations, Networks for Business

Expanding from residential into business services is no small task. As they try to make their mark on the business services front, the cablecos talk about what they’re doing behind the curtain.

Anticipating an increased traffic load created by business customers and residential users, Cox announced earlier this year the completion of a core network capacity upgrade throughout the service provider’s Connecticut and Rhode Island networks with equipment from OpVista Inc. The effort was begun in mid-2006, with a goal of settling on a single DWDM platform scalable to 800gbps to support new 10gbps Ethernet services. “The completion of this core capacity upgrade enables Cox Communications to provide enhanced, high-speed services with faster turn-up of services throughout Connecticut and Rhode Island,” says Chris Saunders, director of network technology for Cox Communications New England.

Meanwhile, in Las Vegas, the company created SLAs between departments so there would be no finger pointing and to ensure everyone understands how to service the business customer, says Leo Brennan, vice president and regional general manager for Cox Communications-Las Vegas.

At Comcast, the company is implementing processes from the top down, starting at the national/corporate level, says Bill Stemper, president of Comcast Business Services. “We want to do things once and then bolt that on to our local operations,” he says. “We thought through all our functions — product development, strategy and marketing — and decided which should be done in one place and in one way.”

Comcast also is taking a nationwide approach to order management and tools, training curriculum, sales compensation, profit and loss settings, and operational measurement metrics, he adds.

Steve Trippe, vice president and general manager with Charter Communications Inc., says his company has been fine-tuning its business processes on the commercial services front and recently rolled out a new compensation plan because it realized it “had been measuring the wrong things.”

Charter also does post-mortem reviews on lost business customers. “We also take a close look at reports on customers that have left so we can learn from the ones we’ve lost,” he adds. “We had been looking at churn on the residential side of the house and needed to look at it for business customers as well.”

Meanwhile, the cablecos are working to address how to meet the needs of businesses that have sites outside their regions. Several cablecos teamed to link power plants in the state of New York. Still, appealing to businesses that straddle MSO boundaries is a work in progress. “There isn’t an easy answer,” admits Kenneth Fitzpatrick, senior vice president at Time Warner Cable Business. “We’ve looked at everything from joint ventures to advanced peering, and more. And we’re still looking.”

Find out more about how the five largest U.S. cablecos are launching a new offensive to attack the unprotected flank of incumbent telcos and secure SMB customers, by reading xchange’s July story “Cablecos Get Serious About Business.”

Charter Communications Inc. www.charter.com
Comcast Corp. www.comcast.com
Cox Communications Inc. www.cox.com
OpVista Inc. www.opvista.com
Time Warner Cable www.timewarner.com

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