Now, the company employs one laser per node, which means more space and more power needed at the headend. The result, of course, is greater bandwidth to the customer. Then there was the question of finding enough qualified personnel. In many cases, it became necessary to hire additional engineers and technicians away from the telephone industry because it would take too long to train cable engineers on the intricacies of telephony. Young says Cox most likely will wait a few years to see which vendors and architectures will win out in the IP telephony race.
Circuit switches have a rich feature set.
IP telephony would need a reasonable set of those services. From start to finish, the process of upgrading a typical section of Cox plant to two-way and getting telephony services up and running took between 18 months and two years. Some of the larger systems required as much as three years. Once the service is up and running, it can be a challenge switching customers over from their existing service without interruption, especially if the customer wants the same telephone number. We set up an install time with the customer and try to coordinate with PacBell.