Years ago, companies like Charter, Comcast (News - Alert), and Cox were one-trick ponies. They offered one kind of service – cable TV – and they sold it to a single customer set – consumers.
A lot has changed in communications and networking in the last few decades. The companies mentioned above and their peers are now known as cablecos. That’s because they offer much more than just TV services. Cableco portfolios now include an array of video, voice, and data services. They even do home security.
But that’s not all. The cablecos have expanded beyond their consumer-only strategies of years past to also reach the business market.
This is all probably not news to you. After all, the cablecos launched their efforts to target business customers about two decades ago. However, if you don’t closely track the cableco space, you may be surprised to learn how very successful the large cablecos (or MSOs) have been in the business services space.
Commercial services generate nearly $18 billion for U.S. cablecos. That’s more than $16 billion than business services contributed to MSO coffers 12 years ago.
“The four biggest U.S. MSOs – Comcast, Charter Communications (News - Alert), Cox Communications, and Altice USA – each now produce well over $1 billion a year in business revenues,” reports Alan Breznick, noting Comcast alone should report $7 billion in commercial revenues this year. He adds, “The next three largest operators – Mediacom Communications, WideOpenWest (News - Alert) Holdings, and Cable One – each generate well over $100 million in commercial revenues.”
As the cablecos built their commercial services businesses from the ground up, they enjoyed double-digit growth. But, now that they have established revenues in this category, it has become more difficult to maintain that level of growth. So, cablecos have been working to keep their momentum going in business services.
They’re adding new managed services and offerings, such as SD-WAN. They’re bringing fiber closer to customers for faster connections and better business application performance. They’re working to bring in more large businesses.
Serving large enterprise will require the cablecos to do some things a little differently, says Ciena. For example, Ciena says the cablecos will now need to offer and support service-level agreements.
SLAs guarantee business customers a certain level of service. If the service provider fails to deliver on agreed upon service availability and quality metrics, the SLA may call for the business customer to get a refund. Perhaps more importantly, failing to meet SLAs results in unhappy customers and the potential for lost business. So, cablecos need to take care to establish SLA strategies and ensure their networks are ready to support them.
Ciena suggests it’s easier to support SLAs on fiber than HFC access infrastructure. The company adds that adaptive network architectures and the use of “real-time, path-aware operational monitoring, and back-in-time forensics to troubleshoot programs that can cause service disruptions and impact SLAs,” can also help cablecos succeed in the large business space.
Edited by Erik Linask