CABLE CREEPS AHEAD

Last week's National Cable Show, though drenched in its typical celebrity appeal, was yet another warning shot to telcos: The industry once known for its notorious customer service is now serious about getting into the voice business. Among the vendors pushing various softswitch architectures (and the few that won't say the word “softswitch”), a handful of service providers showed up to pitch the idea that cable operators don't have to get their hands dirty to actually provide voice. Instead, carriers including Net2Phone, Vonage and even 8×8 were offering up packaged voice services that could be sold under any cable operator's brand. Most significant was Vonage's announcement that it had signed its first two cable operators, Armstrong Cable and Advanced Cable, as resellers. Like the shots that preceded it, the show at Chicago's McCormick Place won't go down as the Fort Sumter battle in the larger war between cable and telecom for the residential voice market. The war is already in full swing, with cable operators taking some small outposts and telcos pretending the world is at peace and that they are in firm control. While Vonage isn't going to scare anyone and likely won't have much of an impact on any telco's bottom line, the company is a harbinger of things to come. Its move into the cable market gives multiple systems operators a technology that is not only disruptive, but can be deployed without much effort. For telcos, writing off the competition is about to get more costly.