Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Simon Flannery - Morgan Stanley.
Simon Flannery - Morgan Stanley
I wanted to get some more clarification around the degree of marketing activity, both by Verizon and by competitors. You mentioned that there was some cable companies were talking about merger disruption. Was that as a March event, or was that going on all through the quarter?
And was there less marketing activity by Verizon in Q1 versus the run rate in 2007, or was it fairly stable? Just so we can get in context, something that we might see going through the next few quarters?
And any general comments on the economy, you mentioned the non-paid disconnects being fine. Anything else, you’re seeing in relation to housing impact, wireless substitution, or any business failures, or anything like that in any of your markets.
Eugene B. Johnson
Our sense is that there were essentially no marketing activities in these markets during that period. The only activity that we saw in the last quarter or so was the spillover for markets that are the Boston area, for instance, close to New Hampshire and so on. And our market activities are picking up, but I want to remind you that we really can’t put new bundles in. We can’t really change products and services, because of Verizon’s inability to provide, to build those for us while we’re still on the TSA. So we don’t expect to be able to significantly increase our marketing activities.
However, we are doing marketing of the existing products and services that are available today of the existing broadband offerings, for instance, that have not been previously marketed. And we can be fairly aggressive about that. We have stepped up our sales activities, both on the business side and on the consumer side.
I think we’ve indicated before that we actually have salespeople on the street calling on customers above $333 a month in revenues, and that something that’s never happened before. We also have stepped up already very quickly the sales efforts for the small businesses below $333 a month through our call centers. And where we are actively making those calls which was not happening before.
And likewise have stepped up the activity in our calling centers for our residential business. I’m sure you’ll hear more about that next week. But quite frankly, I don’t expect to see significant change in our results, from our marketing and our sales efforts until later this year, probably third, fourth quarter timeframe, just because of the fact that we can’t put our new offerings in place until we cut over from the TSA to our own systems.
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