Cox Business to roll out SIP trunking later this year

Aiming squarely at the 20-99 person SMB, Cox Business will be rolling out SIP trunking later this year. It's one of many products the company intends to roll out once it has its Voice Manager hosted IP PBX service fully established.

Speaking to Fierce last week, Cox Business Vice President Phil Meeks sees plenty of opportunities as businesses move off of legacy data communications services and onto Ethernet. Establishing an IP pipe means being able to provide a variety of services from simple voice to more advanced services, with hosted IP PBX and follow-on software-as-a-service (Saas) offerings bringing in more dollars on top of customer transport.

"The [small and medium-sized] businesses we're targeting typically don't have IT staff, even people in the tech business," said Meeks. "Technology is changing so quickly they want to understand what technology does for their business, not what the technology is... we're marketing to the financial guy, not to the IT guy or Manager."

Currently, the VoiceManager hosted service is in six of Cox's 18 markets, with the rest scheduled to be turned on by the end of 2009. SIP trunking should launch in Q4 of this year.

A future addition to the product set will be wireless, first with CDMA technology and later moving to LTE. "We're viewing wireless not only as a product in a bundle, but a way to extend mobility to everything," Meeks said, with voice, video and data all playing a role in an integrated fashion.