Having emerged as the U.S. industry leader for consumer VoIP, Comcast is now taking aim at business with a basket of offerings including its digital voice service. The service will be pitched at small- to medium-sized businesses as an alternative to the business service packages now being promoted by both Verizon and AT&T.
The voice service has proved to be very popular with households, with more than four million subscribers cutting their traditional phone line to take up the service. Married with Comcast's impressively fast Internet service, it is more than a match for the many service providers out there offering a DSL broadband and VoIP service. But while Comcast has shown it can match the telcos in the residential space, it will need to prove the reliability of its service for business. Comcast shares its bandwidth and having your Internet connection slow to a crawl when the kids come home from school, and fire up their on-line gaming, is not going to work for business. Nor will businesses put up with a voice service that regularly drops out, which has been this writer's experience--until the sixth technician visit finally fixed the problem.
For many SMB's the debate over VoIP is well over, and many are now contemplating what unified communications strategy to take up from the slew of vendors offering highly competitive packages.
For more:
-Comcast has an idea for business Article [1]
Related articles:
Verizon business offers video conferencing Article [2]
Companies such as Verizon and IBM are in pursuit of unified communications [3]
Links:
[1] http://seekingalpha.com/article/67476-comcast-has-idea-to-go-after-small-business
[2] http://www.fiercetelecom.com/story/verizon-business-offers-hd-videoconferencing/2008-01-25
[3] http://www.fiercetelecom.com/story/ibm-buys-webdialogs/2007-08-23