The best phone company in America?

THE FOUNDATION for Cox's current success in telecom was laid in the early days of its decision to enter the telephony market, under now-retired CEO James Robbins.

“We knew we had to be as good or better than the incumbent LEC from a product perspective, a reliability perspective and a service perspective,” said Chris Bowick, chief technical officer. “Very early on, the company did a lot of research on how we could use the [hybrid fiber/coax] plant to offer voice.”

What came out of that research was a unique local network architecture that Cox calls ring-in-ring HFC, which initially used fiber rings down to nodes of less than 1000 homes, and now is deployed to nodes of less than 650 homes. That architecture exceeds even what incumbent telcos provide in terms of survivability.

“When you look at it that way — we had redundant rings down to sub-1000 home nodes — and you try to equate that with twisted pair coming out of COs serving 15,000 to 20,000 people, the redundancy we had was phenomenal,” Bowick said.

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.”

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.

“When we go into these markets — last year we launched 18 markets either as new voice markets or as a new overlay of VoIP — and you just go into these systems and find people are so excited,” Kaish said, “That enthusiasm is like it was in the IXC days when we launched frame relay or IP. You can tell these people are proud and excited to be offering voice. I was very impressed with the level of technical talent and commitment and the quality of designs in the network, that I frankly didn't think a cable company was capable of doing.”

The other immediate appeal, Kaish said, was the ability to put everything on a single pipe into the home right from the beginning, instead of trying to knit together a DSL line, a POTS line and a satellite link, as BellSouth did when he was there.

“To have that right away and to be able to build from the beginning — it reduces the number of points of failure, and makes it easier to troubleshoot,” he said. “It's a much more straightforward plant.”