Pivot Media, the consulting firm sharply focused on rural telco issues, held a webinar last week that offered some words of wisdom on marketing the triple play. Glen Butler, director of technology planning at Waynesboro, Va.-based telco nTelos, presented a case study of his company's experience offering triple play to customers in Virginia and West Virginia, though some of his more intriguing comments had to do with the video part of the triple play bundle:
"When you enter the video business, there is pent-up demand, but people are also much less patient with their video connection than with the voice connection," Butler said of the importance of service quality. "The number of calls we get about video are much higher than when voice goes out."
Butler said nTelos started offering video services last October over a fiber-to-the-home gigabit passive optical network architecture. He said the company chose FTC over DSL or other technologies because it needed to make a fresh market impact. "When you are the third market entrant [with video], you are competing against the undecided," he said. "We would have to work hard to keep up with speeds DSL and cable already offer, so we decided that if we were going to spend the money, we would rather be superior. We decided to move ahead, rather than keep up."
For more:
- read this Editor's Corner on the Pivot Media webinar at FierceTelecom.com