Cable wants you to know it's more than TV service

If you’re thinking about investing in Ethernet technologies to give your networks more capabilities, the cable industry wants your business.

The cable industry has been increasing its business service lines and one of the areas it has been targeting is healthcare, said Todd Esenwein and Angie Britt, of CTAM: Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing, a cable industry membership organization.

“Traditionally, the cable industry was built around the residential community and their networks are very deep in those communities, and that’s where we find the hospitals, doctors’ offices and ambulatory facilities … so it became a very natural fit for them to provide these high-speed services and leverage their very large network,” said Esenwein, CTAM’s director of business services.

The business services lines have had 20 percent to 25 percent growth in the last few years for the top cable companies (Cox Business, Time Warner Cable Business Class and Comcast Business) and are among the industry’s third or fourth fastest growing areas, he said.

As healthcare providers are faced with growing demands on their networks – remote patient monitoring, electronic health records, telemedicine, voice, images, collaborating with multiple locations – those networks, many based on T1 technology – are increasingly strained. The cable industry has the infrastructure and the deep reach into communities to make purchasing your Ethernet service a smart investment, said Alexandra Sewell, executive director of emerging markets at Comcast Business.

“The ease of being able to scale your network as the demands grow on your network is something that’s very attractive to folks,” she said.

Ethernet service – whether it is provided by a cable company or not – offers some definite advantages to companies that have needs large enough to warrant such a system. For instance, cost to set up and maintain and expand is lower than the more standard T1 network, Sewell said. And because Ethernet can offer speeds up into the double-digit gigabits, Ethernet service also offers healthcare organizations the room to grow and to do so inexpensively. “It is a very attractive product, especially if you’re looking to manage costs,” she said.

Going with Ethernet service through Comcast was a “no brainer” for Jeff Coleman, information systems manager of Seattle-based Navos Mental Health Solutions, partly because he had few Ethernet provider choices, but also partly because of the cost equation: for what he would have paid for three T1s with maximum speeds of 4.5 Mbps, he gets a private network connecting the organization’s campuses at speeds of up to 100 Mbps and the possibility of scaling up to higher speeds if needed without having to add – and pay for – a lot of new equipment.

A Comcast case study estimated that Navos saved $600 a month with the Ethernet service, but Coleman figures the service is probably saving more than that since the organization is now using more bandwidth than four T1s could provide.

Whether you take up cable’s pitch will depend on a number of factors, including Ethernet provider availability in your area and your organization’s strategic goals, budget and network needs – current and projected into the future.