August 3, 2005

Service & Price: Cable Companies Want Your Boardband Business

Traditionally, telephone companies have been the huge sellers of broadband to businesses. Their DSL lines snake in and out and all over. Cable has of course been the dominant force for home broadband but not business. One reason for this is that telephone companies can bundle other data services to businesses and cable can't.

However with the Internet being used more and more for trasnmitting voice calls, cable is just another commodity service and your local cable company might be willing to do more for you than your cable company will.

The NY Times writes n the end, he chose Cox because it could put in the fiber line all the way to the computer servers in his office for 15 percent less than the others - and it could do it in days, not weeks. Cox, which also required a shorter contract, had workers installing the line after midnight (the least disruptive time to do that work), and its engineers remained on call 24 hours a day via their cellphones.

To attract business customers like Mr. Thomas, cable companies are increasingly positioning themselves as a friendlier, cheaper, more flexible alternative to the Bells and are aiming to win the smaller corporate clients that the big phone companies have tended to neglect.

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