First-quarter earnings announcements from the publicly traded cable companies continue, with Time Warner announcing results yesterday. Like Comcast, Time Warner Cable registered a stellar quarter that underscores the power of Cable’s bundle of video, voice and Internet services. The benefit of bundling isn’t new news, but you wouldn’t realize that from reading some recent press coverage. Take this statement from one such article: “Cable operators started taking on the phone companies head-to-head last year [emphasis added by us] when they began offering telephone service.” Actually, Cox Communications launched cable telephone in 1997. Today, there are nearly 2 million residential customers of Cox Digital Telephone, which is delivered over circuit-switched technology to some customers and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) to others. VoIP has certainly enabled more cable companies to begin offering telephone during the last couple of years, but cable telephony didn’t actually begin with VoIP. For nearly a decade, Cox has been delivering serious head-to-head competition to the RBOCs and experiencing the customer satisfaction and business benefits of a "triple play" bundle of services. In fact, our telephone penetration is 33% of our total cable customers and 24% of all homes passed by our network. With all of that said, we do think it’s great that more in the media are suddenly cluing in to the Cable bundle, particularly in the face of RBOC bluster about their fiber deployments. Record results from cable companies to start a year that’s being touted as the industry’s most competitive is a strong statement from consumers about their preferred source for communications and entertainment services.