Calls Opportunities
Telephony
Reinventing Voice
by Linda Hardesty
Comcast targets an underserved
niche in residential telephony.
At Cox, business telephony
leads in innovation.
Discussionsoflead- ing-edgevoice technologymight includeamyriad oftopicsfrom sessioninitiation protocol(SIP)to
WiMAX vs. LTE, to sophisticated telepresence systems. In October, Comcast announced a new product in the telephony
space: cordless phones.
Wait, isn’t that more 1980s than 2009?
Apparently, it’s a bit of the glass half-emp-ty as opposed to the glass half-full. While
execs at the incumbent telcos fret about the
demise of the landline, Comcast has identified the landline as an opportunity.
“Almost 80 percent of households do
have a wired telephone connection, and
the home phone has much better clarity
and call consistency than your mobile,”
according to Charlie Douglas, a spokesman for Comcast, who added that the average household replaces its home phone
every 18 months.
In a mature cable television industry,
Comcast is targeting retail consumer
electronics, dominated by the Walmarts
and BestBuys of the world, as a potential
growth business. With consumers replac-
ing their phones so often, “the size of
that market is huge, hundreds of millions
of dollars a year,” said Douglas.
“There haven’t been any real innovations to the home phone since caller ID,”
he said. “It’s another example of how
we’re trying to bring innovation to what
we see as a completely ignored technology—the home phone.”
HomePoint
Comcast’s cordless phone VoIP offering
has been named “HomePoint,” and is
being offered initially in its Fort Myers,
Florida system. Thomson is providing
the digital enhanced cordless telecommunications (DECT) device.
DECT is a technology that’s been
around in Europe for 15-plus years, with
handsets available at retail in the United
States for more than five years, according
to Brad Sparks, Thomson's director of
business development, North American
Cable. In 2005 the FCC allocated spectrum for DECT in its own band, so it has
no competing devices.
“It’s really interference free,” said Sparks.
“It has great range, up to 300 meters as
opposed to WiFi, which is expensive and
doesn’t have very good range. DECT also
has a data channel where we take advantage of Internet related items.”
“This is a DECT phone on steroids,”
said Douglas of Thomson’s advanced
cable gateway. The HomePoint gateway
has a DOCSIS 2.0/PacketCable 1.5-pow-
ered voice modem and 802.11 a/g home
router. Additionally, it has two Ethernet
ports and one RJ- 11 phone line.
Subscribers can purchase up to five
Home Point handsets to access voice mail,
of course, as well as personal information
from their PC, including email and electronic address book. The DECT technology
will also handle some Internet Widgit-like
applications, including top news stories,
sports scores and weather reports.
“We call it Infosnacking,” said Sparks,
“The whole idea is being able to enjoy
operators’ services away from the PC.
This product de-commoditizes the dial
tone. The focus is not on dial tone, but
also allows you to get a whole package.”
Sparks said Thomson is working with
other operators that are interested in the
cordless phone gateway. “They’re watching what Comcast is doing. And the
competitive landscape demands they do
something different than just offer dial
tone,” he said.
