And that makes it easy for cable giants Time Warner and Comcast to continue stealing the telcos’ core voice customers at a pace of roughly 11 to every one video order they lost in the first quarter of 2008.

 
More to the point, cable companies are offering perks such as call-waiting, call forwarding, even unlimited long distance and local calls all for one flat fee—especially if rolled into a triple play of video, broadband, and voice.
 
While the phone companies are offering triple plays too—they have a long way to go before they can build a video business as big as cable’s. Plus, they’re adding on the least-profitable portion of these services because the margins on video are going down as the cost of programming goes up. Someone, it turns out, has to pay for ESPN’s $1.1 billion N.F.L. deal after all.
 
Also, cable is flirting with its own high-speed offering—like FiOS—tagged DOCSIS 3.0, which has hit speeds of 100 Mbps in tests, 20 times the speed of traditional broadband.
 
Time Warner Cable has run the service in small markets, and Cox Communications is preparing to launch DOCSIS in certain markets depending on the competitive need, according to David Grabert, Cox’s spokesperson. Translation? When FiOS comes calling, Cox customers can expect high-speed options of their own.
 
But what some say cable is really waiting for is WiMax; think WiFi in hyperdrive. It’s expected to change the way consumers think of mobility by letting them access the internet at high broadband speeds wherever they are.
 
Time Warner Cable, Comcast, Intel, and Google, among others, are clearly committed to the technology, announcing investments of collectively more than $3 billion in Sprint Nextel and Clearwire’s WiMax venture on Wednesday.
 
Still, WiMax is very much in the initial testing phase in the U.S, and the first service provider to deploy WiMax in Australia declared it a complete failure just last month, saying the signal could not reach into a structure beyond 1,300 feet from its base station.
 
So, after all the technological bells and whistles, the final leg could be won by the simple, low-tech act of playing nice. After all, there are few customers who haven’t had a phone-line crackle, a broadband light go dark, or a cable guy who just never shows up.
 
When a customer is lucky enough to reside where there’s competition for the home connection, a block party and some good customer service isn’t going to hurt.
 
That is, if the option is even there.