TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: The Best Phone Company in America

Re: The Best Phone Company in America

Steven J. Sobol (sjsobol@JustThe.net)
Fri, 5 Jan 2007 04:27:58 UTC

In article <telecom26.4.5@telecom-digest.org>, Jim Haynes wrote:

> Sighted in another venue is a link to an article in Telephony:

> http://telephonyonline.com/mag/telecom_best_phone_company/

> jhhaynes at earthlink dot net

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]

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