By Tim Young

The struggle between cablecos and telcos continues to rage. It's a natural battle, really. In many markets, smaller telcos are hard-pressed to do battle against incumbents, and cablecos are the most obvious choice for a competitor. They've gotten quite good at and quite comfortable with voice service, and consumers are growing ever-more trusting of VoIP and dependent upon data connectivity.

Conversely, with FiOS, advanced IPTV, and other video services available as weapons in the telco arsenal, and with time marching on and rollouts continuing, telcos may be able to stay in this thing.

One bit of back-and-forth lately has been as a result of Charter Communications' introduction of DOCSIS 3.0 in the St Louis area, which is apparently an affront to Verizon, who took shots at the cableco. (The entire exchange can be found in Karl Bode's blog at dslreports.com, available here).

Let's take a look at the state of the conflict, from the perspective of a few CSPs on both sides.

Looking Across the Aisle:
There was a time in which cablecos and telcos played neatly in their own sandboxes with very little overlap. Telcos did voice. Cablecos did video. Neither did much data, though that was telco's realm, such as it was. Phones were phones and cable was cable and never the twain would meet.

It's clear that such an idiom no longer applies.

“Cable companies do represent direct competition for Verizon,” said Robert Elak, spokesperson for the telco. “Our two segments represent the primary avenues for customers to bundle their services – voice, broadband, TV (either double or triple play) and bundling is king for customer retention.” Jenny Bridges, spokesperson for AT&T concurs, especially “as the lines between cable and telecom companies blur, with both

co-marketing agreements with Satellite companies that allowed them to compete with us on the residential ‘triple play’.”

Maura Mahoney, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for RCN Metro (the business-class transport subsidiary of US cableco RCN) also agrees: “RCN Metro thrives in a world of ‘co-opitition’, in which carriers are our customers, providers and competitors. This division has been able to effectively compete and win enterprise customers from telcos throughout it's history.”

Enterprise:
So the residential market is viewed as anyone's ballgame. The enterprise (and even the SMB) space, on the other hand, has long been the domain of the telco alone.