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Talk is cheap and it's going to get cheaper.
Stiffer competition and pricing pressure, plus a regulatory wild card, could give Cablevision Systems Inc.'s fast-growing Optimum Voice Internet telephony service a touch of laryngitis, analysts say.
For its first quarter, Cablevision reported that it had added 42,200 Optimum Voice customers, or 3,200 per week, bringing it to 70,815. That puts its penetration of homes passed at 1.6 percent, with plenty of room for growth.
Those numbers, driven in part by Cablevision's aggressive bundling of video, Internet and voice service, have cheered investors. Analysts caution, however, that Cablevision will not have a stranglehold on the VoIP market for long. Verizon, the region's dominant provider of telephone service, is expected to begin rolling out a voice-over-broadband service to customers of its digital subscriber line Internet service in select markets by mid-2004.
AT&T recently introduced its Call Vantage VoIP service for customers of either DSL or cable-modem service, and Sprint is expected to enter the market later this year. Meanwhile, VoIP pioneer Vonage already has signed up more than 150,000...