Cable Will Eat the Phone Company's Lunch...

摘要

When Time Warner Cable launched a phone service in Portland, Maine, last May, the company guessed that only a few thousand customers would shell out $49.95 for unlimited local and long-distance service. Turns out, President Keith Berkley's predictions were wrong-way wrong. "We upped our goal, then doubled it," he says. "That sat on the table. Then we surpassed it." A year later, the Portland system has signed up roughly 140,000 customers-nearly 10% of its cable subscribers-to its phone service. Portland is among the first cities where cable operators plan to devastate telephone companies with VoIP, or "voice over Internet Protocol," which allows phone calls to be transmitted in the same way e-mails are sent. Beyond TV and high-speed Internet, the new Internet phone service is the latest product-if not the hottest-that cable operators can now sell over the same wire.