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.