Cox Communications, Rhode Island’s dominant cable television provider, will continue its push into the local telecommunications market this year by offering wireless telephone service.

“I would expect in 2007 you will be seeing a wireless product offered by Cox New England,” said Paul Cronin, vice president and regional manager of Cox New England.

The integration of wireless into Cox’s service bundles comes as the Atlanta-based company looks to compete with AT&T Communications, Verizon Communications Inc. and other companies that offer consumers one-stop shopping for phone, Internet and cable service.

In November 2005, Cox, Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable and Advance/Newhouse Communications announced they would form a joint $200 million venture with Sprint Nextel Corp. to provide cable television, high-speed Internet, wireless phone and traditional phone services to about 41 million customers currently served by the four cable companies and to Sprint’s nearly 46 million wireless subscribers.

Cox has been testing its new wireless phone offering in Phoenix and San Diego and plans to aggressively roll out the plan in New England and other markets later this year, Cronin said.

Cox, the first U.S. cable company to enter the telephony market nationally, entered Rhode Island’s residential telephone market in 2000.

This year, Cox also plans a national rollout of its latest digital telephone offering: Phone Tools, an application that combines Cox’s telephone and Internet technology using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology.

The Phone Tools service features an Internet graphical user interface that allows customers to listen to voice mails online, manage call forwarding and other calling features, view their call history of incoming and outgoing calls and automatically forward copies of new voice mail to their e-mail in box.

Phone Tools is a residential-market product, but Cox spokeswoman Leigh Ann Woisard said a commercial answer to Phone Tools will also be launched this year.

Cox also plans to introduce a service in some markets that allows customers who subscribe to its digital cable and phone services to use the TV to see who’s calling them and, if they wish, to redirect incoming calls to their voice mail or to another telephone number.

Last year, Cox received the highest honors in J.D. Power and Associates’ 2006 Residential All-Distance Telephony Customer Satisfaction Survey in the Northeast, Southwest and Western regions.

Cox, a privately held company, won’t provide numbers to quantify its penetration into Rhode Island’s telephone market. But Cronin did say that, whereas five years ago, only a small percentage of Cox’s revenue in Rhode Island was derived from anything other than cable TV, today, much of its revenue in the state comes from Internet and telephone plans.

“It used to be they were very small. Now, that’s just not the case – they’re quite prominent,” Cronin said.