Cox Has Vendors, But No Date
By Multi Channel News Staff -- Multichannel News, 11/28/2001 10:23:00 AM
Cox Communications Inc. won't say when work will start on its roughly $150 million network transfer from Excite@Home Corp., but two vendors just announced that they will supply the effort.
And a bankruptcy court judge will decide Friday whether Excite@Home can cut service to residential customers, including Cox's, raising questions about what's next.
'We terminated our contract with [Excite@Home] effective June 2002,' Cox spokeswoman Ellen East said, 'so it's always been our intent to transfer our network.'
While the transfer has been 'in the works for a while,' it hadn't progressed beyond the planning stages.
'It has not been launched, and we have not issued any kind of schedule,' East said. 'June 2002 is a good day to work from,' she said of Cox's targeted completion date.
Cox was conducting meetings Wednesday morning to finalize plans on how to service its customers if Excite@Home were to get approval Friday to shut down and then do so.
'We're hoping that it doesn't occur,' she said. 'It's not the best thing for our customers or Excite's other customers.'
The hearing, she added, will determine if Excite@Home has the right to shut down, but it doesn't necessarily mean the high-speed-data provider will shut off service.
'If they do [decide to shut down] immediately, we hope that there would be a transition period,' she added. 'Depending on the length of time, we have options.'
The hearing will also go over the value of Excite@Home's assets, which it had announced that it would sell to AT&T Corp. for $307 million.
A creditor committee and a shareholder group argued that the company is worth more. Cox hopes that because negotiations are going well with the creditors, 'Friday becomes a nonissue,' East said.
Cox's efforts won't affect the reorganization plan submitted to the bankruptcy judge last week by a group of Excite@Home shareholders.
'We factored in the loss of Cox after the completion of their 2002 contract expiration,' said Frank Thomas, group spokesman and a drafter of the plan. 'I personally believe that when we are successful with an independent ATHM [Excite@Home's stock symbol] out of bankruptcy, [Cox] will be back in the fold with ATHM within three years.'
Thomas added, 'It doesn't make sense to manufacture your own microprocessors if you are Dell [Computer Corp.] and there is an Intel [Corp.] around, and it won't make sense to try to keep up with the economies of scale of an independent ATHM network if you are Cox.'
Although the company wouldn't say when or where work will start, both ADC Telecommunications Inc. and Riverstone Networks Inc. announced that they would supply the effort.
'That's exactly right,' East said. 'It's time to start putting the equipment in place. We're talking about short-term.'
ADC said it signed a three-year agreement to supply Cox with 'FastFlow Broadband Provisioning Manager,' which helps to control the service-provisioning process.
Likewise, Riverstone said Cox will deploy 'hundreds' of its 'RS-line' metropolitan routers in Cox's 28 U.S. cable systems as part of the program. The deployment will occur over the next several months.
The company said Cox will initially deploy 'RS 3000' metro-access routers, as well as 'RS 8000/8600' multiservice metro routers and 'RS 38000' metro-aggregation routers with Riverstone's 'Hitless Protection System.'
The router platforms will let Cox use existing asynchronous-transfer-mode and SONET (synchronous optical network) infrastructures, Riverstone said.
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