Mark Kaish, BellSouth’s vice president of next generation services, is changing sides of the field. He will be joining Cox Communications this month to head up voice services development strategy, according to industry sources.

Kaish, who previously worked at AT&T, Sprint and Savvis Communications, had headed up BellSouth’s voice over IP operations. Known for his candor, Kaish had repeatedly said that, while VoIP is the direction in which the industry was headed, it would not take over the market as quickly as industry hype is projecting.

By moving to Cox, he becomes part of a rapidly exploding VoIP market. Cable telephony, most of which is based on VoIP, is growing at double digit pace, according to second quarter results from major cable players.

Cox faces a unique challenge within the cable industry because it originally deployed voice on circuit switches and is now providing its digital phone service on both softswitches and circuit switches, as it transitions the latter into the IP world with equipment vendor Nortel.

By year's end, Cox Digital Telephone service is available to residential and small business customers in 22 markets, or 79% of its cable footprint.

Those markets include: Orange County and San Diego, Calif.; Phoenix and Tucson, Ariz.; Omaha, Neb.; Central Connecticut.; Rhode Island statewide; New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Lafayette, La.; Oklahoma City and Tulsa, Okla.; Wichita, Kansas; West Texas (including five geographically dispersed locations: Lubbock, Amarillo, Midland, Abilene and San Angelo); Hampton Roads, Roanoke and Northern Virginia; Las Vegas; Macon, Ga.; Central and Gulf Coast, Fla.; and Topeka, Kansas.