Our college correspondent, Rachel, is studying abroad this semester. But, as her experience demonstrates, it’s not hard to bridge the miles given all of the technology choices today. She shares a few of them here—and also provides further insight into the communications needs and habits of the “echo boomer” generation. [More about the echo boomers here.]

I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to study in Barcelona, Spain for the semester. While I knew beforehand that this is the opportunity of a lifetime, I expected to encounter certain barriers in communicating with my friends and family at home. Now I’m halfway through my stay here, and I’ve found that I can stay closely in touch—as long as I can get an Internet connection.

The Internet provides many ways to connect with other people. Two of the most popular among my peers are Facebook and Skype.

We’ve talked a lot about the telephone companies’ tactic of doggedly forcing changes in rules they don’t like in order to further their agendas. Now AT&T and Verizon have some company in the “rules-don’t-really-apply-to-us” camp. At a recent conference, Greg Meffert, the chief technical officer and deputy mayor of New Orleans, essentially claimed his city is above the law. To operate its wireless municipal network, New Orleans is defying Louisiana’s Fair Competition Act, which places a cap on data speeds at 128kbps. He’s apparently proud of that. “We’re the city. What happens if we break the law? We’re just going to do it,” Meffert boasted. There’s no denying that residents of the New Orleans area have been through hell the last six months and still struggle with basic necessities of life we just take for granted. But other service providers in New Orleans—Cox Communications included—have been through the storm, too, and have worked tirelessly following the hurricane and flooding to restore communications and entertainment services—without breaking the law. Competition is good for consumers when service providers play by the rules and on a fair, level playing field, and that applies equally to cable companies, RBOCs and cities that choose to build their own muni networks, including New Orleans.

House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton (R-Texas) released a bill yesterday granting national video franchises to the RBOCs. In his response, it was clear that Kyle McSlarrow, President & CEO of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA), is happier with this version than the draft leaked a couple of weeks ago. “Earlier drafts of the House bill focused on picking winners and losers on the basis of technology, and we are pleased that focus has now changed. While our policy recommendation would be to reform and streamline the franchising process to ensure speedy entry by new competitors, we are pleased that the national franchising scheme proposed in the House bill seeks to ensure all providers compete on a level playing field,” McSlarrow said in a statement. The House bill, he said, “represents considerable progress.”

Under the proposed bill, the phone companies would receive 10-year national franchises to offer video services. There would be automatic renewal after each 10-year period. In markets where the telcos provide video service, local cable companies would be freed from local franchises in those markets and granted a national franchise. Gone from the bill is an earlier proposal that would have subjected cable companies to existing local franchises until the RBOCs received 15 percent video penetration locally.

The bill does include a network neutrality provision. Said McSlarrow, “we continue to believe that the better course is for the government to resist injecting itself into a thriving, dynamic market where investment and innovation are flourishing.” The House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet will reportedly hold a hearing this week and vote on the bill next week. [McSlarrow’s full statement.]

“Echo boomers” are the 73 million+ children of baby boomers who say that, if forced to choose, they’d choose—gasp!—the PC over the TV. In the busy lives of the echo set, mobile phones and game consoles also rival TV in importance. For them, it’s all about mobility, portable content and networked devices. (They've been labeled echo boomers because they’re the demographic echo of their parents' generation. You may also know them as "Gen Y" or the "millennials." For more about them, check out this CBS News report.)

Why do the echo boomers' entertainment choices matter? Because they're quickly displacing their parents as household decision makers and in three years will be making nearly 25 percent of all household purchasing decisions. So, for communications and entertainment service providers, fulfilling the tastes and whims of these 15-to-25 year-olds is critical. Cox Communications President Pat Esser addressed The Media Institute last week and stressed the importance of paying close attention to the demands and buying habits of this generation.

Esser also addressed the critical importance of ensuring a level playing field for service providers, allowing the echo boomers and other consumers to determine the winners and losers—not unnecessary regulation that treats some companies unfairly. “Consumers will lose big on a tilted playing field that favors one provider over another. It’s not okay to have two wildly differing sets of rules for companies in a hotly competitive video business. And it’s not okay to burden providers in a competitive marketplace with arcane, cumbersome rules and regulations that stifle innovation, choke private investment and drive up prices for the new services that consumers deserve,” Esser said.

Click here to listen to the full speech.

The Wall Street Journal has an article today about the Verizon- and AT&T-backed Consumers for Cable Choice, which we’ve been talking about [here, here, here, here and here] for some time. [Here’s the article, although you’ll need a WSJ subscription to access it.] Under the guise of fighting for consumers, Verizon and AT&T have been using the front group to fight for regulatory changes that would treat them differently (and more favorably) than competing cable companies. The WSJ article cites a report from consumer advocacy group Common Cause on nine organizations, including Consumers for Cable Choice, whose efforts they label “astroturf” —coined by Texas Senator Lloyd Bentsen more than two decades ago to describe the fake grassroots efforts backed by corporate interests. To be fair, Common Cause blasts Cable right along with Verizon, AT&T and other telecom interests for what it calls the industry's support of some similar organizations.

We’re not sure who Forrester Research surveyed in studies cited in The Washington Post yesterday, but we seriously doubt they talked to many Cox Communications customers. The piece questioned whether consumers really want to purchase “bundles” of multiple communications and entertainment services. The title, “No Bundle of Joy,” leaves little doubt about the conclusion the article was trying to make. One of the claims attributed to a Forrester Research analyst was that “surveys show that only 5 percent of subscribers buy bundled services.” Hmmm.... We think they must have bypassed Cox markets with these surveys, since close to 50 percent of our customers—yes, that’s 5-0—buy at least two major services from Cox (from among our cable, digital telephone and high-speed Internet offerings). Further, we’ve found that customers are clearly satisfied with the bundle, since churn drops dramatically among those who subscribe to more than one service. We suspect other Cable companies might take exception with Forrester’s finding, too.

UPDATE: Forrester Research analyst responds: "...the quote is a classic misinterpretation of the data." Click below to see full comments.

Broadband Everywhere, a bipartisan organization promoting the broadest deployment of competitive broadband networks and whose membership includes the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, issued a statement countering AT&T Chairman Ed Whitacre’s comments at the TelecomNext show. Whitacre claimed that the RBOCs’ video services “will result in lower prices from cable companies, and that’s something they have not been used to.” His claim, according to the Broadband Everywhere statement, “is a classic example of the pot calling the kettle black. It’s also indicative of the kind of misleading tactics which the Bell monopolies continue to practice. The Bell companies’ efforts to crush competition in the local phone industry hasn’t led to lower prices, as Mr. Whitacre claims. The opposite is true – the average monthly bill in urban areas has actually increased roughly 25% in the last decade and 275% since the federal government broke up Ma Bell in the 1980s.... To make matters even worse, as they lobby for their sweetheart deals in various states with promises of lower cable bills, they’re actually asking for permission to raise phone rates even further.” Click here for the full statement.

If Cable is in a competitive war, then the “general himself” was on hand to start the second day of the Cable Television Public Affairs Association (CTPAA) conference. That’s how CNN Washington Correspondent Ed Henry introduced NCTA President and CEO Kyle McSlarrow. They proceeded to discuss several of the issues contributing to what Henry called, in an understatement, a “challenging first year on the job” for McSlarrow.

“I take with a grain of salt everything the Bells say,” McSlarrow said to laughter and agreement from the audience of Cable public affairs pros, and he characterized the RBOCs’ history as “replete with broken promises.” He noted that the Telecom Act of 1996 granted the RBOCs four ways to enter the video market and compete against Cable. However, he said, “They spent the next 10 years sitting on their hands” while Cable took full advantage of the Act and began delivering consumers a competitive choice in telecom. Now, as Verizon, AT&T and other RBOCs are finally developing video services, he said, they’re expecting Congress to “rewrite the rules to give them a sweetheart deal.”

McSlarrow emphasized that Cable is not fighting competition—“We accept that we live in a competitive world”—but wants to ensure the “rules of the road” treat all competitors the same.

The annual FORUM conference of the Cable Television Public Affairs Association (CTPAA) kicked off today in D.C. with a panel of executive heavyweights representing cable operators and programmers. Overall, it was a cordial session in which the only fighting words—from the cable operators—were directed at the telephone companies. With programmers selling their networks to Verizon and AT&T for those companies' new video services, David Zaslav, President of NBC Universal Cable, used humor to sidestep any overt discord with his operator counterparts: “We’re platform agnostic, although you guys are definitely our ‘preferred’ distributor,” he told them. Laughter ensued.

Landel Hobbs, COO of Time Warner Cable, lobbed this shot at Verizon: “We’ve gotten more phone customers while we’ve been on this panel today than Verizon has total video customers in Keller,” he said of Verizon’s much-touted inaugural video market, Keller, Texas. Neil Smit, President & CEO of Charter Communications, the cable provider in Keller, questioned Verizon’s stated customer results there. “What’s being put out by Verizon in Keller isn’t consistent with our data,” he said. “There’s a lot of info being put out as truisms that needs to be debated.”

John Bickham, President of Cable & Communications for Cablevision Systems Corporation, said of Verizon, “I don’t think they will see a return on their investment. Eventually, the results will reveal what’s really going on. Eventually, analysts will ask the tough questions (about Verizon’s Keller experiment), and I think it’s a very tough road ahead for them.”

All panelists—operators, programmers and the moderator, CNBC anchor/reporter David Faber—did agree that Verizon and AT&T have been particularly aggressive and successful in selling their agenda in Washington.

Kudos to Ron Lieber of The Wall Street Journal, who actually appears to understand the difference between Cable’s VoIP phone service and Internet telephone. (You’d be surprised how many people—reporters included—don’t get it.)

In his piece, “When to Ditch Your Phone Line” (here’s the link; a WSJ subscription is required to access it), Lieber writes, "If you call 911 through the Comcast, Cox Communications or Time Warner phone services, you reach your local emergency operator, who can also see where you are." That’s a critical distinction between most cable phone services, in which calls travel over managed backbone networks, and Internet telephone services, which route calls over the public Internet and can’t guarantee Emergency 911 calling. Lieber also notes that back-up powering is automatically provided with most Cable VoIP services; not so with Internet telephone.

Lieber’s grasp of the distinction is encouraging, but we don’t kid ourselves that the world will automatically understand that VoIP doesn’t equal Internet telephone. For more details on the important differences between the two, click here.

Research released yesterday inserts a new voice into the debate about a la carte. To this point, we’ve heard mainly from the politicians and special interest groups, but a survey by Leichtman Research Group, Inc. in Durham, NH, solicited opinions from consumers. The results are a bit surprising. Initially, 40 percent of the 1,586 adults polled expressed interest in choosing channels individually. However, their interest dropped when informed that they’d receive fewer channels for the same price they’re paying today and would need a set-top box in order to receive channels a la carte. “The concept of being able to choose and pay for only the channels that you want initially sounds appealing to many consumers, but in assessing bona-fide interest in an a la carte offering, it is important to provide consumers with the actual implications of receiving such a service,” said Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group. “When consumers are informed of the requirements and consequences of receiving a la carte, we find that about one out-of-six consumers are very interested in a la carte as it would appear in reality.”

An odd quote from former cable guy Leo Hindery in today’s New York Times piece, Those Bell Mergers Are Giving Cable Companies Even More to Worry About. The article posits that the RBOCs—AT&T and Verizon, in particular—are going to give Cable fits. Hindery’s contribution to the article? A quote with this kicker: “The cable guys are boxed in, and I don’t think there’s a Hail Mary pass.”

That’s curious sentiment coming from someone who should know better.

Cable has some crafty plays in its own book; plays that doomsday game-calling like Hindery’s completely ignores. For instance, as the NYT article does note, Cable has been exceedingly successful in taking phone customers away from the RBOCs in droves and in becoming far more than a video-only provider. And features like high-def, video on demand and digital video recorders are strongly bolstering the video component of Cable’s already strong bundle of services that includes digital voice and the fastest high-speed Internet.

Granted, the competitive landscape isn’t getting any easier given the RBOCs’ aggressive video entry and the implications of the proposed mega-union of AT&T and BellSouth. And there definitely is no shortage of reasons to keep the collective eyes of the Cable industry squarely on the actions of the RBOCs—particularly in Washington, where, as the NYT piece notes, AT&T and Verizon certainly know how to “throw their weight around.”

But, in respectful disagreement with Hindery and the doomsday bunch, we say there’s no need for a Hail Mary pass in a game you’re clearly winning and have every confidence you’ll continue to lead in the next quarter and through to the final ticks of the clock.

Reports from D.C. indicate members of the House Energy & Commerce Committee have agreed on principles that could be included in a bill that would award the RBOCs a national video franchise. We haven’t seen the proposed legislation yet—it’s reportedly expected next week—so we can’t comment on details. But, as NCTA head Kyle McSlarrow told reporters yesterday, we’d have to agree that if the actual provisions are as initial reports are characterizing them, it would amount to quite a “sweetheart deal” rewarding the relentless lobbying of Verizon and AT&T. Multichannel News reported that the expected legislation would grant national franchises to the phone companies while subjecting Cable to existing local franchises until the RBOCs get 15% video penetration locally. The RBOCs, McSlarrow told reporters, “don’t really want 15%. They want the right 15%." We maintain that consumers would benefit from video franchising rules allowing Cable and the RBOCs to compete fairly, not on an unlevel playing field unfairly benefiting the likes of Verizon and AT&T. Stay tuned for more once we see the expected legislation and can determine how level or slanted a field it would likely create.

As AT&T pushes its takeover of BellSouth, the company continues to decry the myth of “cable monopolies.” Ironic considering AT&T’s massive $67-billion proposed marriage would create a national powerhouse combining the remnants of four of the seven regional telephone companies carved out of Ma Bell in 1984, when the government moved to break up a true monopoly.

So, while cable companies like Cox operate locally, serve customers locally, hire locally and contribute to local economies, the RBOC children are uniting to create another centralized national behemoth. They’ve already admitted the AT&T/BellSouth union will cost more than 10,000 local jobs—and that’s on top of an additional 26,000 local jobs eliminated when SBC acquired AT&T last year (and later assumed the AT&T brand), and through other “operational initiatives.” That doesn’t seem to bode well for true localism.

We’re sure the government will scrutinize this one diligently. There definitely will be dozens of issues to carefully consider to ensure consumer protection and a level playing field for service providers. Competition is a good thing for all when it’s a good thing for consumers. But whether this massive merger will truly be a good thing is a question impossible to answer right now. That answer will have to be sorted through over time, in the best interests of consumers, and by relying on far more than the RBOCs’ well-worn, self-serving talking points.

“In the last decade, the Bell monopolies have all but wiped out their telephone competitors; they have swallowed their long-distance competitors; and with the announcement of the AT&T-BellSouth merger, they are on the verge of recreating Ma Bell. And only one competitor really stands in their way: the cable industry.” —Kyle McSlarrow, president and CEO of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA), in a letter sent today to members of Congress, responding to the full-court press of AT&T and Verizon in pushing for changes in video franchising rules.

McSlarrow's letter accompanies a document that refutes several of the common "myths and half-truths" espoused by the RBOCs in their quest for special treatment. Another nugget from the letter: “My point here is not to question the merger, which will be handled appropriately by the relevant federal agencies and Congressional committees. Rather, it is to suggest how extraordinary it is for an industry, in which one company alone – AT&T – has a market capitalization greater than that of the entire cable industry, not only to ask for special favors from Congress but in fact demand free license to enter the video market while maintaining all current regulation on a much smaller cable industry.” Click here for the full letter.

It’s been a few years, but VoIP is still an industry darling. But a lot of confusion still remains. As you sift through the various solutions, you’ll see that one size does not fit all. We’d like to help. So here’s a breakdown of our VoIP technology. We encourage you to take the time to compare the various offerings – we think you’ll see a striking difference.

Here’s why:
• Our phone calls never travel the public Internet or even require a broadband connection, thanks to our private, managed IP-based data network that uses VoIP “technology.”

• Our network gives top priority to voice packets (rather than data) to prevent bottlenecks that cause delays and lessen the voice quality. Our technology delivers the same high quality user experience as traditional phone technology.

• We have always provided access to the FCC-mandated Enhanced 911 system so critical address/location information is automatically delivered during an emergency situation.

• Our VoIP architecture enables phone service to continue to work during a power outage by providing hours of battery back-up service.

• A telephone installation is not always a simple do-it-yourself project. Cox Digital Telephone service is installed by professional telephone technicians, using existing telephone jacks. We are staffed locally and readily available to support any service issues.