It s not cheap to enter telephony. In addition to plant upgrades, Cox has invested in 10 Nortel DMS 500 switches, customer premise equipment from Arris, and network powering. It s capital intensive. But, those investments are paying off. Fifty percent of customers take a second line from us.
Profits are good too.
The one good thing about the telephone business is that there are no programming costs. We like that business, and we are expanding it as rapidly as we can. It expects to have 400,000 voice customers by the end of the year. Our biggest limitation right now is how fast we can bring on qualified people to perform the provisioning and installations. Currently, we have 237 people doing nothing but provisioning.