 decisions will address the mag- nitude of this fee. In fact, one reason that VoIP has become SO popular among those deploying the service is that it is currently classified by the FCC as an information service rather than as a telecom service, which means that VoIP carriers are exempt from many of the regulatory tethers that bind traditional service providers. The Cable Multiple System Operators (MSOs) As we often hear, "There's the good news, and then there's the bad news " In cable, the good news is that cable MSOs are taking two-thirds of all broadband data (ISP) customers and own two-thirds of the broadband consumer market. In fact, three out of five of the largest broadband providers are cable companies. Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. Telecom Market Segments Telecom Market Segments Furthermore, they are going after voice customers with VoIP, offering the service at an incremental fee plus video, a strategy that erodes the ILECs' base. In fact, because they are also content providers with plenty of mindshare, cable MSOs are a more serious competitive threat to ILEC local service dominance than the CLECs are. The CLECs, after all, do not, for the most part, go after residence customers; they are too difficult to provision en masse. Instead they go after the aggregated enterprise customers that reside in MTUs because provisioning them is a simpler and less costly process. In fact, many analysts predict that if cable MSOs can crack the code on delivery of voice and can centralize their manage- ment and repair functions, they could become the first choice for the delivery of integrated services. And today they seem to be doing this- and are just beginning to announce wireless as a secondary service option. In late December 2004, Sprint and Time Warner announced their intent to work together to give Sprint the ability to sel