Residential services remain at the heart of the cable industry, but let’s not forget that business represents a significant growth opportunity as customers demand enterprise-class local service and support to meet their specific needs.

As Jim Barthold reported in Communications Technology last week (http://www.cable360.net/ct/news/ctreports/27960.html), the people at Cox are, indeed, Taking Care of Business.

This month, three premiere events took place in the Phoenix area: the Super Bowl, the FBR Open (the largest PGA tournament each season with more than 530,000 fans) and the Barrett Jackson Collector Car Event (280,000 attendees, including Jay Leno, Muhammad Ali, Patrick Dempsey and other celebrities, 1163 vehicles, $88 million in cars sales). The massive voice, video and data infrastructure and services engineered to support these events were provided by Cox Business, not the local telco.

Vertical Systems Group recently announced that Cox Business continues to lead the country as the fourth largest provider of Ethernet services, the high-speed data networking connection of choice for businesses. This puts Cox Business, with 10 percent market share, ahead of all cable providers and several other telcos.

Many of the discussions that we have in the cable industry involve the residential market, and rightly so, given cable’s history of delivering home entertainment services across the U.S. However, it is important to recognize that cable providers deliver competitive voice, data and video services to businesses of all sizes as well. Many of these businesses seek solutions from cable as an alternative to the telcos and quickly realize that residential is not the only place where Cox is a trusted provider.

A new report from BernsteinResearch includes some interesting stats from Massachusetts, where Verizon is delivering its FiOS video service in several communities.

We draw two conclusions from the [Massachusetts Department of Telecommunications and Cable] data. First, the data broadly confirms the obvious; Verizon's FiOS is, as expected, gaining traction and share. Second, the results belie the consensus expectation that Verizon's gains will inevitably mean steep losses for cable incumbents.

Thre report notes that Verizon’s 2007 gain in the Massachusetts communities was far larger than Comcast’s losses.

This counter-intuitive observation reflects the manner in which cable subscriber growth has remained essentially flat even while new entrants (the DBS providers) have, over the last fifteen years, grown to 33M subscribers: industry growth and, to a lesser extent, loss of share by smaller providers.… The result runs contrary to expectations about TelCo entry into the TV market, but are consistent with broader themes of limited TelCo overlap: Verizon FiOS will be available to just 16 to 17% of Comcast subscribers by the time Verizon completes construction of the FiOS network in 2010/2011; and continued (even modest) industry growth. The net effect on the cable industry is a loss of share – but a relatively steady subscriber count over the period.