The Future of Cable Business Services -- Perhaps the secret to becoming a more competitive cable company is to forget that you're a cable company.

The "Cable's Service Challenge: Going Beyond Gigabit Speeds" panel here on Thursday morning highlighted the need for cable companies to help educate the market on what capabilities their technology provides, leading to public-private partnerships and more discussions about the requirements of business applications. The conversation has shifted from selling network capabilities themselves based on download speeds, the kind of wire being used, and other network-centric metrics that most business users really don't care about if they have enough connectivity.

Sometimes the discussions of fiber vs. DOCSIS and the marketing of speeds and feeds is undermining the cable providers' ability to just sell services. "1 Gig is a lot of bandwidth and you don't need it to run a credit card machine," said Kristi Salmon, Senior Director of Marketing, Business Services at Mediacom Communications Corp.