Not surprisingly, we love the current cover story in Telephony magazine, “The Best Phone Company in America?” Of course we love that it implies (without explicitly answering the question posed in its title) that Cox Communications is that phone company. But beyond the obvious self-serving, self-congratulatory reasons for us to love reporter Carol Wilson’s article, we above all respect and admire its painstakingly thorough review of the dozens of steps and components required to successfully launch and deliver cable telephony. In what is essentially a tutorial for new entrants in the telecom space, the article addresses basically every gory detail of the telephony biz—network redundancy, powering, billing and provisioning, customer care, knowledge management, training, research, etc.—in a surprisingly readable way. Granted, we admit that, other than Cox employees, it likely will be the rare reader who will stick with every one of the more than 3,500 words in the thing. But for those who like their business news unabridged, it definitely provides some enlightening historical context to the current hyper-competitive telecom marketplace.