Getting it right

Unlike some cable operators, Cox Communications is serious about succeeding at telephony. The Atlanta-based multiple systems operator (MSO) is so anxious to get out there and compete with the ILECs that it's not waiting for IP technologies to mature, it's going head-to-head with constant bit rate gear that uses switches from Nortel Networks.

The thing is, as with most cable operators, the people who run things at Cox know more about provisioning video than they do about setting up voice customers. This opens the door for Sigma Systems Group, which has built its telecommunications niche making sure that providers can provision.

“In the cable world a lot of this is very new,” said Robert Bratulic, Sigma's director of marketing and strategy. “Sigma and Cox together has been great because we have a product called ‘CLEC in a Box’ which is pretty much aimed at the CLEC market.”

Typically, Sigma's cable provisioning has been in the area of high-speed data and interactive TV with a smattering of telephone via a provisioning package called “Broadband in a Box.”

With Cox, “we're able to cross-pollinate and bring our telephone knowledge to a cable world that's still very unfamiliar with it. In some ways we even act as a bridge to that world to help cable understand what switching is all about. We've even brought over components of CLEC in a Box to Cable Broadband in a Box,” Bratulic said.

It's a two-way street, said Veenod Kurup, Cox's data OSS director.

“We had used Sigma previously for interactive TV,” Kurup said. “The only problem with interactive TV was that even though we were ready with the provisioning platform, the technology itself never really went anywhere. That's still sitting in the lab.”

Telephony is going somewhere. Cox has about 250,000 telco subscribers nationwide. It's already introduced the Sigma provisioning in its Hampton Roads, Va., and New England regions and is eager to move it to other telephony sites, Kurup said.

Sigma has an advantage.

“They know telephony,” Kurup said. “They have dabbled in that space before.”

That makes his life easier. “Any time you bring vendors in… you pay them good money for four months to learn your business, and then they become productive after that. The advantage with Sigma was to minimize that learning curve,” he said.

The advantage for Cox telephony subscribers is to get telephony services with a minimum of hassle, Bratulic said.

“The subscriber has no idea who Sigma is,” he noted.

The MSO is a different matter because it's Sigma's software that marries that subscriber to the cable operator.

“When you [as a subscriber] call up Cox and say you want cable telephony, somebody at Cox will trigger our software,” Bratulic said.

That software will then set up the subscriber account at the Nortel switch and activate whatever features the subscriber has requested. Then it will activate the Arris Cornerstone technology that serves as the gateway between the cable hybrid fiber/coax network and the public network. “There are some signals that need to be sent to the Cornerstone product in order to take the call over to the [public network]. We activate that as well,” Bratulic said.

Cox is Sigma's biggest cable customer, but the Toronto-based company is making inroads into the cable industry by licensing its technology with prices based on how many telephony subscribers the cable operator wants to add.

“An MSO that's still trialing this out to a few thousand subscribers will not pay as much as a full-fledged implementation,” Bratulic said.

Automation, he added, is the only way cable telephony will evolve.

“When you're going out activating switches, cable modems, cable modem termination systems and so forth, you need to automate, especially with the volumes these people are looking for to become profitable,” Bratulic said. “That's where we come in. We help large volumes of cable broadband activations get automated real fast.”