An otherwise interesting article in BusinessWeek includes a couple of notable inaccuracies. While the piece effectively captures the tone of a heated battle between Cablevision and Verizon on Long Island, it mistakenly credits Cablevision with being the first major cable company to offer cable phone service, in 2003. Actually, it was six years earlier, in 1997, and the company was Cox Communications. The article also cites Cablevision's 13% penetration of telephone homes passed as the highest among major cable companies. Wrong again. Cox Digital Telephone's 22% penetration of telephone homes passed leads the industry.

For the second year in a row, a broad coalition of parties worked hard to convince Congress to exempt the federal Universal Service Fund (USF) from the requirements of the Anti-Deficiency Act (ADA). In both years, the coalition succeeded in the waning days of the Congressional session to attach language to appropriations legislation granting one-year exemptions for the USF. Without the exemption, schools and other beneficiaries of the program would have been faced with not being able to pay their technology bills.

posted by CoxEngr
Qwest's latest attempt to improve their market share in the high speed data arena is to try and market their connections as "dedicated". However, as many people know, those copper wires that DSL depends upon only travel a couple of thousand feet until they hit what's called a DSLAM, where that connection becomes a shared connection with everyone else in the neighborhood.

In a Dish Network publicity stunt, town leaders of Clark, Texas (the one in Denton County, not the one in Liberty County) voted to rename their town Dish. Here are the top ten perks we think the residents of Dish, Texas can now look forward to.

10) All those hours of satellite TV outage will give town leaders ample time to plot their takeover of Dallas/Ft. Worth.

Has the phone company pulled a fast one on you lately? The answer is yes if you've been listening to the so-called Consumers for Cable Choice (CCC). Busy with a new anti-cable website and costly marketing campaigns and governmental lobbying, the CCC apparently hasn't found time to let Americans know that the RBOCs – Verizon and SBC, in particular -- have a heavy hand in the "coalition's" operations and provide significant funding to the "coalition."

Why is everyone talking so much about E911, the simple three-digit number we reserve for emergency situations? The key is in the "E," and it stands for “enhanced”. This means your 911 call automatically goes to the public safety answering point, enabling a local operator to identify the physical address and phone number of your call. E911 has always been included with Cox’s telephone service — from the day it was launched in 1997, carrying through all of launches to date, and beyond -- including recent launches of Cox Digital Telephone via VoIP technology.