Time for your company to consider cable?

One reason I think so: the success of Cox, in particular. Cox's business services - specifically for to small-to-midsize businesses -- have skyrocketed in the past decade. In 2000, the company's business revenues were roughly $100 million; today they're over $1 billion. The company says it has more than 250,000 business customers, and is offering a mix of voice, data, Internet, hosted VoIP and Ethernet services.

To top things off, Cox recently announced a rollout of wireless services in a handful of selected geographies in Virginia, Nebraska, and California. The company has made on-again-off-again plays in the wireless space, most recently with an offering that ended in 2008, but this re-entry signals, if nothing else, Cox's understanding of the criticality of wireless services to business.

The only player in town

Cox isn't the only player in town, of course, and there are indications that its larger cable competitors -- particularly Comcast and Time Warner Cable -- are taking note. An interesting piece in the Philadelphia Business Journal highlights progress that Comcast is making with business customers. (See "Comcast Commits to Business Customers"). The piece provides the example of Univest Corp., which started out using Comcast to back up its T-1 lines, but now uses Comcast as its main voice and data service provider (with the T-1s as backup). The stars are aligning, in other words, for cable companies to begin capturing some serious enterprise market share.

The second challenge is penetration within coverage areas. Cable companies' buildout is largely residential, and in most geographies, extending that to cover business locations requires some significant capital expenditure. Cox's success in the business market is the result of a decades-long investment in extending infrastructure to businesses; the other cable companies are just waking up to this opportunity.