It’s worth noting that cable’s phone business has grown in a fairly short period of time. The current competitive age can be traced back to the passage of the deregulatory 1996 Telecommunications Act. Following that, the cable industry invested more than $100 billion in private capital to upgrade its network infrastructure in order to provide broadband services.

But even before today’s IP-based phone service, some operators took the plunge into phone. Back in September of 1997, Cox Communications launched circuit-switched phone service in Orange County, California. Comcast (via its acquisition of AT&T Broadband) also has a base of circuit-switched customers that were generated following the acquisitions by AT&T of TCI and MediaOne in 1999.

Time Warner Cable launched the initial IP-based voice service in Portland, Maine in August of 2003. Soon thereafter, in November of 2003, Cablevision Systems made digital voice service available to all homes passed by its systems in the New York metropolitan area.

In slightly more than a decade, cable has gone from a customer base measured in thousands to more than 15 million cable voice customers (both IP-based and circuit-switched). More remarkably, that figure represents an increase of nearly 300 percent from the end of 2004.

It’s probably also worth pointing out that while some telephone companies have gotten into the video business, they are not offering such services all across their footprint. In contrast, the cable industry is currently marketing voice services to more than 100 million homes nationwide. So that figure of 15 million phone subscribers is growing all the time.

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