Cable Voice Customers Understand Services May Go Dark in Power Outages, Say Charter, Cox, NCTA

IP transition proceedings. That apparent widespread consumer understanding in the "decade since the Commission adopted disclosure and labelling rules -- a period in which cable operators have added roughly 30 million voice customers -- strongly suggests the current rules are achieving their intended results," said NCTA in an ex parte filing posted Tuesday to docket 13-5. "Cable operators are open to discussing ways in which we could work with the Commission to facilitate the distribution of additional educational material." Consumers relying on legacy voice services may need additional efforts to ensure they understand the capabilities of IP-based networks once they switch to them, and are mainly LEC and not cable operator users and would be covered under any IP transition rules, said NCTA. It, Charter and Cox asked the agency to hold workshops or start a working group "to discuss the myriad issues raised" by extended power outages. Even following such blackouts, "an exceedingly small percentage of cable voice customers purchase batteries" for customer premises equipment, said the association. "Any mandate to provide batteries to all VoIP customers would be tremendously wasteful and would impose significant unwarranted costs on consumers." Cablevision, also an NCTA member, and Charter made similar arguments in another recent FCC meeting (see 1505060046).