Cox Business historically has been a premiere provider of cable television services to our military. With the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, we have evolved into a full-service provider of advanced voice, data and video services.

In 1998 and 1999, we partnered with two major United States Air Force bases to provide local commercial telephone services, including traffic studies, number portability, direct inward dialing, commercial subscriber lines, digital trunks, ISDN PRI, transport channels and systems, operator and directory assistance. Other United States Army and Navy partnerships soon followed, which included additional commercial telephone services and data transport, plus managed and unmanaged WAN services.

Our self-healing, 100% fiber-optic rings with path diversity SONET and ATM solutions have enabled us to provide a full range of telecommunications to government customers. In specific service areas, we're a significant "last mile" service provider for long distance carriers under contract to provide the military with the latest technology available. In support of these and many other defense efforts, we provide SONET, ATM, Gigabit Ethernet and Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) to meet a dynamically growing need for increased bandwidth to support our national defense interests.

Cox Business has demonstrated its ability to provide a range of services at a competitive price. We're deeply committed to the communities we serve and will work closely with municipal, state and federal agencies on a "need to know" basis to help these agencies develop and meet their secure and unsecured voice, data and video telecommunication objectives.

Following is an example of one of our military partnerships.

An unnamed military base was relying on outdated telephone service, which resulted in frequent busy signals when personnel tried to make off-base calls during peak hours. Plus, its security awareness was also outdated. The goal was to increase capacity, heighten security and "future-proof" its telephone system.

Cox Business recommended a fiber-optic digital communication system that included an additional telephone number prefix, faster switching connections, increased off-base calling capacity, caller ID and desktop videoconferencing. This provided increased capacity and security; plus, the system's ring-in-ring fiber-optic backbone ensured continuous connections without a break in service.