February 11, 2008

Residential vs. Business Voice

By Jennifer Rinaldi

As cable operators expand telephony offerings, they encounter both similarities and significant differences in delivery requirements for commercial and residential services.

"We have two networks," said Charles Scarborough, director of product development for Cox Business. "We have a coaxial network, and we also have a fiber network. We do pretty much all of our trunks over fiber today. You get the resiliency, the capacity and everything that goes along with that."

Cox also has its VoIP infrastructure on the HFC plant, "what's referred to as PacketCable in our world," Scarborough said. "We do share the same infrastructure, but there are some distinctions."

Among those distinctions is battery life. Commercial voice service is subject to more stringent battery requirements (typically eight hours of backup) than residential.

Dispatch and traffic

Another distinction is customer response time, often dictated by service level agreements (SLAs) more strict than might be provided for residential entertainment service.

"We have a dedicated tier two group just for commercial customers and priority dispatch associated with commercial voice," said Kevin O'Toole, VP of business products and strategy at Comcast.

"We are governed by the tariff, but typically we do handle our commercial customers a bit more," Scarborough said. "But we are strictly governed by the tariff."

While customer service requests may be a priority for cable operators, their business telephony traffic is treated much the same as residential.

"All telephony is prioritized on the network, be it residential or commercial," Scarborough said. "We don't make a distinction .... (W)hen you pick up the phone and create a quality of service transmission, you're allocated time slots or transmission slots, and that's valid for residential or commercial."

"All of our voice packets receive the highest priority as they traverse our network to ensure great quality," O'Toole said of Comcast. "There's no differentiation in terms of how we treat business voice packets vs. residential voice packets, but it does take advantage of that same network."

Scarborough added that prioritization only really comes into play when you have congestion on your network anyway. He said that Cox manages its network "pretty darn well, so we rarely even have a situation where there is congestion. In the very rare instances where there is congestion, telephony traffic always gets priority over data traffic."

"You're not going to get into a situation, where you might with Vonage for example, when you have congestion going over the top," Scarborough said. "Vonage, if there's congestion on the Internet ... they're going to have problems that we don't because we provide quality of service on our own network. In the rare instances where there is a congestion problem, residential and commercial telephony are treated equally."

The premise for this equal protection is simple, Scarborough explained: A 911 call for residential is just as important as a 911 call for commercial when you come down to it. Somebody's life is a stake.

- Jennifer Rinaldi