Congrats to CableLabs! It’s another sign that collaboration truly pays off. CableLabs, the cable industry’s non-profit research and development consortium, announced this week that its awarded “qualification” status to DOCSIS 3.0. What does that mean for the customer? This opens the door to even faster Internet speeds and a broader variety of services that can be offered over cable’s broadband network.

According to CableLabs experts, DOCSIS 3.0 specifications enable “downstream data rates of 160 Mbps or higher and upstream data rates of 120 Mbps or higher.” In the CableLabs release, Cox President Pat Esser is quoted as saying, “This DOCSIS 3.0 specification is yet another example of how cable is continuing to advance the power of broadband. This technology ensures that our customers will have access to the fastest and most robust Internet service available and allows us to introduce a new generation of advanced service offerings to our customers.” Click here to read the full CableLabs announcement.

We couldn’t be prouder of our leader, Pat Esser, who is named as the first Executive of the Year by Multichannel News in this week’s issue. The caption on the caricature of Pat says it best, “Recognized for outstanding leadership and corporate management, the Executive of the Year demonstrates that success in the marketplace is achieved by putting customer satisfaction front and center and that by focusing on customer service, a company also serves its employees, investors and the overall industry.”

Pat is prone to describing himself as one of the luckiest guys in cable, but we all know that the “luck” is the sum of opportunity and preparation. While Pat entered the industry as an average communications graduate from the University of Northern Iowa, he has consistently positioned himself to meet opportunity (like when he packed up all of his belongings into the back of his car to try and get a job with Cox in Virginia). His preparedness is second to none. As detailed in the story, Pat spent his first 60 days as president interviewing Cox employees to talk about what they expected of him and the company. Pat understands that listening is an essential ingredient in leading.

Perhaps the best thing about Pat is that, at work, he’s just another member of the team with a contagious excitement for the possibilities ahead.

To say that it has been an eventful year for the Cable industry in the halls of the FCC might be a bit of an understatement. At Cox, we continue to do our best to share information about our business so our regulators can make informed decisions about the industry.

We can’t help but be intrigued by Cable360.net’s webinar scheduled for Wednesday, Regulation Redux: How to Navigate the FCC in 2008. Click here to register. The premise for the Webinar is a call to action that the cable industry must be up-to-speed on all of the moving parts with the FCC’s initiatives. In spite of the challenging regulatory climate, Cox remains committed to demonstrating for regulators through our actions in the hotly competitive marketplace that the cable industry is delivering tremendous value to American consumers.

Have you been to a Wal-Mart lately? If so, Wal-Mart’s latest in-store adventure, “Connection Centers,” might have caught your eye. It’s a consumer-electronics experience, backed by specially trained Wal-Mart employees who are there to sell popular home electronics products like high-definition television, telephone and broadband Internet services. And there we are, Cox, inside the nation’s largest retailer, showcasing our bundle of Internet, video and phone services and making it even easier for consumers to connect their new high definition televisions, personal computers and more to Cox services. And with more than 140 million consumers nationwide visiting a Wal-Mart store every week, this translates to LOTS of HDTV’s being sold. So, yes we are elated to have our services located in the same spot that consumers make their electronics purchase. Talk about convenience. Now, Wal-Mart shoppers can go home complete: A new HDTV, an extra surge protector from aisle #7 and a bundle of Cox services to enhance their home communications experience (and save some money too). It’s the Wal-Martization of Cable and it’s long overdue!

With the number of HD channels rapidly increasing at Cox and in the spirit of anticipated benevolence bestowed upon budding home entertainment aficionados this Christmas, we decided to do a quick analysis of the most popular HDTV options in the market.

LCD (liquid crystal display) and Plasma flat screens are the most debated options, but microdisplay rear projection televisions, such as DLP (digital light processing, manufactured by Samsung, Toshiba, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, LG, RCA), LCoS (liquid crystal on silicon, manufactured by Sony, JVC and Brillian) are another great HDTV option. These TVs aren’t thin enough to hang on walls in most cases, but they have a small footprint, 15 inches deep on average and are relatively lightweight.

Cable often gets a bad rap for customer service, but recently Arizona State University’s business school recognized Cox’s customer service achievements. Over a decade ago, as Cox transitioned from a cable company to a multi-service telecommunications provider, it became clear that the best way for us to compete was to make sure all aspects of our business focus on the customer first. Cox invested in training for customer service, and training remains a key priority for our company today. So while we all can get a laugh out of the hijinks in the 1996 movie The Cable Guy, we work hard everyday to make sure that plot line remains only a work of fiction for our customers. To read more about Arizona State’s write-up on Cox’s customer service, click here.

Last week the Associated Press reported on AT&T’s 4-hour DSL outage which impacted their customers across the Southeast on December 3. We don’t usually use this forum to discuss our competitors’ network outages. An outage can happen to an telecommunications company for a variety reasons ranging from simple human error to technological failings and natural disasters.

What brings us to mention this on Digitalstraighttalk.com are reported comments made by Dave Burstein, editor of the industry newsletter DSL Prime who said that broadband outages are not unusual. He is quoted, "Broadband goes down much more often than telephone lines because they didn't build the system for the same level of reliability. We do not know how often it happens, however, because they're not obligated to report it."