Name: Greg Bicket
Age: 48
Position: Vice President, Cox Communications New England
Background: Bicket has run Cox’s New England operations since joining the company in April 1999. Before joining Cox, he owned a consulting business for clients developing domestic and European video, voice and data business opportunities. Bicket also has served as chief operating officer of Online System Services, an Internet portal company, and as head of CableVision-TC12’s large cable television and high-speed data system in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His South American assignments also included work in Chile, Brasil, Mexico and Venezuela. Bicket has helped launch a wireless company and served as senior vice president of operations at a group of United Artists Cable systems. His first job in the cable industry was in 1980, when he served as general manger in several locations for American Television and Communications.
Education: Bachelor’s degree in finance from the University of Illinois in 1973. Master’s degree in business administration from the University of Phoenix in 1990.
Family: Married, no children.
Residence: East Greenwich
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PBN: Cox recently rolled out local telephone service in parts of northern Rhode Island. Can you give our readers in other parts of the state an idea when the service might be available to them?
BICKET: Well, the initial areas were Woonsocket, Cumberland, Lincoln, Smithfield and North Smithfield. The market response there so far has been exciting. Later this spring we’ll be making another announcement about an expanded area. We hope to be through the Providence metro area by year-end. It’s our goal to have the entire state done by next year.
Have you had any trouble getting new residential telephony customers switched over from Bell Atlantic?
It’s a bit of a complicated process in that the number portability issue requires a lot of hands and steps and that sort of thing. (Number portability allows Cox’s new telephone customers to keep the same phone number they had at Bell Atlantic.) But it has gone pretty well. Bell Atlantic has been very cooperative, and we’re certainly ahead of our projections. Customers are eager for it, and early customer satisfaction callbacks have indicated that people are pleased.
What are your expectations for the residential local telephone service here in terms of number of subscribers and market penetration?
Some of those are internal benchmarks that we have. But we certainly hope a significant fraction of the customers in Connecticut and Rhode Island are going to opt for it. We’re north of 10 percent in the areas we’ve served for a while in Connecticut.
Ten percent penetration of cable subscribers in those areas?
Ten percent of the homes to which it’s available. So we’re excited about that. It’s way too early to tell in Rhode Island, but certainly the marketplace has shown sincere interest.
You mentioned customer service. I understand a lack of capacity prevented some of Cox’s telephony customers in Omaha, Neb., from making calls at times this winter. Has that been solved, and is there any danger of that happening here?
Well, that one was a local situation. From time to time, a variety of circumstances can light up your phones, from new product offerings to an outage in an area. But we haven’t had that situation occur here, and we don’t anticipate it. In fact, our network performance–call it up time, if you will–for 1999 has just been looked at. We performed better than 99.953 percent up time, which translates to just a few minutes a year down time. That’s really part of the important dimension of migrating from cable to telecommunications. Cable earned a reputation that wasn’t as high as it should have been in terms of plant reliability, but we’ve had to spend a lot on this plant (the company’s network of cable and fiber optic lines) to convert it from cable to telecommunications.
And now it’s just a matter of getting the public perception to come around?
That awareness is coming through. Our customer satisfaction numbers indicate very clearly that people realize the big changes in the plant.
Are you finding that most of your telephone customers also subscribe to Cox’s high-speed Internet service? In other words, are you getting a larger share of the customer’s telecom business?
One of the things that’s exciting about it is that the most typical order comes from an existing cable home. And often, we’re seeing an order for high-speed Internet and telephony come in at the same time. When the decision is made to upgrade, on all three of our current products, the combinations can be any of the above. So, over time, we think that’s the formula to greatest satisfaction. I will also tell you that we are working on bundling, promotional campaigns and marketing campaigns that increase value with each additional product purchased. That’s kind of our view of how telecommunications are going to work over a single platform.
The high-speed Internet access has been around longer than the local telephone service. How has it been doing? Are you meeting your expectations?
We’re installing hundreds per week. It’s interesting because you try to be as sophisticated as you can about how you market a product like that. But certainly one of the biggest sellers is word of mouth. People will visit somebody, come over for dinner, and say, “Look at this.” A lot of orders come from exposure to the product that way. It really is a product you have to engage to understand how much better it is.
You seem to have a price advantage over the competing high-speed Internet access technology, Digital Subscriber Line, or DSL, in the residential market. Are you feeling any competition from the DSL providers that have been pouring into Rhode Island?
The initial focus for them in some parts of the market has been on commercial service. Our people have noticed that. What we see around the country, though, is competition causes all providers to keep their pencils very sharp. DSL pricing typically is on a reasonably steep price descent and other competitors will respond.
Speaking of the Internet, could you summarize Cox’s position on the open-access debate for our readers? Why shouldn’t Cox be required to share its network with other service providers given that Bell Atlantic is required to share its network with its competitors?
That presumes that we, as a cable industry, kind of throttle the access to the Internet. And certainly that’s false. We are an additional pathway to the Internet. That unbundling (of the Baby Bells’ networks) is one of the ingredients that’s key to creating the competition that we all recognize is so important. In terms of our process, you can get to AOL, for example, with fewer clicks on our service than you can on a conventional wired connection to AOL.
But only via Cox, right? I couldn’t choose my own Internet service provider and still use Cox’s network.
True. That’s right. There are more than 4,000 ISPs out there. I expect that there will be deals cut that add more to our menu over time. We welcome those. It’s kind of a troubling question conceptually because we think that the Internet is probably the best model of truly open competition, and we think it’s working great. We see our product as incremental to that. Our contribution is speed. There are a lot of deals that you can point to in the industry that suggest to me that more and more high-speed cable modem deals with ISPs will be cut in the future.
You foresee more deals where ISPs are reselling cable modem service?
Oh, yes.
And speaking of competitors, the Boston startup American Broadband Inc. has proposed building a rival cable network in Rhode Island. It’s all just talk now, of course, but to what extent do you see this as a threat to your core customers?
The first reaction to this situation began a little over five years ago when we began rebuilding our plant. We think this is going to be the first of several announcements like it. We know that when companies compete, consumers benefit and everybody gets sharper. So, I think it’s good news. To the other part of your question, I think whether they begin as viable competitors depends in great deal on the Public Utility Commission’s examination of their proposal. I will say without qualification that we are excited about competing with any company on a level playing field.
Has Cox competed head-to-head with another cable provider in other markets?
I will say that this kind of competition is emerging all around the country. What shapes it takes in the future will depend largely on the marketplace and financing. There are some who postulate that what we’re seeing is really being driven by current financial conditions around the country.
You mean that there’s so much capital out there right now, that there’s money available for any kind of business plan?
I think you could say that. We certainly take them very seriously; I wouldn’t want you to misunderstand. But, really, our preparations for this kind of competition have been years in the making. The pace of change in this industry is extraordinary. I will tell you too that, at least in their stated proposal, they don’t intend to be a cable company solely. They intend to compete for voice and data as well. So, they represent competition for the markets that we’ve identified and to a lot of other providers.
Cox took some shots last year for not doing more to spur public access programming. In response you rolled out a big public awareness campaign. Has the campaign begun to have any impact yet?
It’s going well. We’ve had several hundred new users sign up and participate in the public access process. We’re certainly pleased about that. I will say that we’ve worked hard to adhere meticulously to the expectations that have been put in place by the commission (PUC) in terms of what we provide in public access. With any process like that, there are occasional glitches, but I think our long-term track record is really quite outstanding. The feedback we get from most users in extraordinarily positive. You can’t please everybody, but we certainly, I think, have made more than a good faith effort in providing the public access to our cable system.
What do you see as Cox’s mission in the near future? Are there any other services you’d like to add?
We hope to establish ourselves as a leading provider of many products delivered over the broadband platform and well beyond today’s video, voice and data. We’re looking in a variety of areas. Virtual private networks, for example, that permit companies to have their employees telecommute. That’s a business that we are already in, and it’s growing aggressively. I think the changing workplace as well as the dissolving bricks and mortar of conventional office space business is a niche we see.
Any final thoughts?
I think everything that was presumed and believed about the cable business has really become antiquated. We’re moving into a new technological environment. We’re moving into a new regulatory environment. We’re moving into new market segments where we weren’t before. We try to keep a very loose grip on our paradigms.
