Wow. Nice.
Cox takes top honors in a bunch of JD Powers categories.
What strikes me is the facility-powered phone lines. Apparently, everyone else is too cheap to do that. In my area, Charter Communications, the local cable franchisee, does phones too -- our current phone service is from Charter - and out in Apple Valley, Verizon is offering FiOS. Both services require the end-user to provide battery backup. In my case, the unit Charter says to use is about $100. (I'm sure we'll eventually get one - but we don't have the extra money right now.)
Quotes:
Cox also decided to make its phone service network-powered from the outset, despite the fact that it was more costly and time-consuming than using local power and battery backup.
"We included generator backup in many parts of the country," Bowick said. "We built hardened facilities -- our master telecom centers were built very early on with NEBS compliance just as you would expect a CO to be. Everything was done top-notch before we entered the business. Early on, it wasn't without some difficulty. This was a new business we had to learn. But redundancy was key; network powering was key.."
and:
Cox also chose to build its own national fiber backbone network so it could offer local and long-distance voice services without having to lease capacity from other service providers. That national backbone connects its local markets and provides both long-distance voice and high-speed Internet transport.
Mark Kaish, Cox's vice president of voice development and support, is a telecom veteran, having worked at both Sprint and BellSouth before he joined Cox in 2005. What he found when he arrived at Cox was a level of enthusiasm for voice services that reminded him of earlier days when telcos were launching data services.
Steve Sobol, Professional Geek ** Java/VB/VC/PHP/Perl ** Linux/*BSD/Windows Victorville, California PGP:0xE3AE35ED
It's all fun and games until someone starts a bonfire in the living room.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: The one thing telcos have going for them -- reliability in a power outage -- is something that cable and internet phones are beginning to learn are very important. PAT]