- Traditional Proverb

Whoever said competition was a bad thing? It separates the weak from the strong, and gives competitors a unity of focus and strength of conviction.

Within the telecommunications space, the big competitors have been the telcos and cablecos. The telcos are the aging prizefighter with years of expertise, but an aging infrastructure. Cablecos are the brash upstarts with plenty of bandwidth but lacking the experience to deal with many problems that arise in the delivery of telecom services. The competition between these technologies, and among their various purveyors, is beneficial to the consumer and to the individual industry segments. Costs must be kept low. QoS must be maintained. Churn must be reduced. That requires companies to make vital decisions, streamline processes, and run lean or risk ceasing to run at all.

This month, we take a look at the battle between cablecos and telcos. We examine elements of both industries, and how each can continue to excel, even as all service providers deal with the looming threat of being reduced to a dumb pipe for third-party packets. We'll take a look at service fulfillment of advanced video, as well as delve into the state of cable telephony.

Also, since it's trade show season, we'll take a look at some of the biggest shows in the telecom space, with reviews from the Cable Show, Management World, and Billing and OSS World, as well as a preview of NXTComm.

All that, plus your latest OSS news. Enjoy, and remember that it's free to subscribe to Pipeline, if you haven't already done so. It just takes a few seconds, and you'll receive our monthly newsletter informing you of the latest issues as soon as they become available. Just visit our subscribers page here.