Continuing its push into the traditional telecommunications market, Cox Communications has rolled out a new business-telephony system in Rhode Island.
VoiceManager, the new telephony platform that Cox Business is marketing to business customers, offers a voice-over-IP telephone system with an expandable suite of features that integrates desktop telephones, PCs, cell phones and other wireless devices through Cox’s own IP network.
Mark Scott, vice president of Cox Business, described VoiceManager as Cox’s next generation of carrier-grade service for businesses, as the company moves telephone services out of the old circuit-switch environment and into application servers within their network.
Such VoIP systems offer benefits that cannot be realized with traditional voice systems, enabling customers to control their phone system’s features remotely in a way that is not possible in the Centrex phone systems that pioneered the use of call waiting, call forwarding and other features in the early 1980s, Scott said.
“VoiceManager is the next step beyond that,” he said. “Not only do you have the features in the network, but you’re able to remotely control many of those features. It gives the user much more control over their communications in this fluid environment that we live in today.”
After logging onto Cox Business’s Web site using a user name and password, VoiceManager customers can utilize a range of call features on their office phone system from anywhere in the world, Scott said.
“Let’s say there’s a bad snowstorm that day and you want to forward your calls to a cell phone or to your house phone,” he said. “You can go right online and direct where that call goes, and as long as it’s an available, directly dialed number anywhere in the world, you can send the calls to that number.”
Atlanta-based Cox Business launched the VoiceManager service this month in Rhode Island and Connecticut, making the company the first traditional cable television provider in country to offer the business market a fully-owned and managed IP telephony service, Scott said.
The company would not say what the service might mean to its bottom line.
Cox plans to roll out the service in two more markets before the end of the year and will aggressively expand to additional markets in 2008, and is especially targeting the product at small to medium-sized businesses, he said.
“This is an ideal feature set for small and medium-size businesses,” Scott said. “You tailor it to the needs of your own business. Ninety eight percent of the businesses in Rhode Island are small businesses.”
The move comes as Cox, the nation’s third-largest cable company, continues to go head to head with Verizon Communications and other traditional telephone companies as technology blurs the lines between the two industries.
In July, Cox Communications entered the wireless telephone market, partnering with Sprint Nextel to launch its cell phone service.
At the same time, New York-based Verizon began competing earlier this year for Cox’s cable television customers in several Rhode Island communities when it launched FiOS, its fiber-optic TV service.
Lillian McGee, a spokeswoman for Verizon, said the company has long offered the business market a comprehensive suite of VoIP telephone products and services that enables customers to customize and remotely manage all their voice and data needs on Verizon’s network.
“We’ve actually been offering that for a while now,” McGee said. “It’s not a brand-new service for us.” •
