Cox Communications Inc. has restored email service as of 6:30 a.m. ET Monday following a storage failure on early Friday night that knocked out access for customers in Cox's East Coast and Midwest cable systems, a spokesman says via email. Cox had restored email service to about 55 percent of affected customers as of 11 p.m. ET Sunday. The operator has been queuing all emails received since Friday, and is now delivering those messages "gradually," but not necessarily in chronological order now that access has been restored. That queuing process could take several days to complete, the company said. Cox said there's "no indication that a security breach" was the cause of the outage, as "the issue is with our email platform." With the system now restored, Cox is moving ahead with a plan to replace its email storage platform equipment and "implement measures to prevent a reoccurrence of these issues."

Dutch MSOs Ziggo B.V. and UPC Broadband have dropped out of the bidding for Long Term Evolution (LTE) spectrum because the price was getting too high "given the additional revenues they expected to get from owning a license." The MSOs, which formed a joint venture for the bidding, said they will instead expand their mobile offerings using already-acquired 2.6MHz spectrum, via Wi-Fi and through their existing MVNO deals.

Avail-TVN has unleashed a subscription video-on-demand (S-VOD) service called ViewNow that features "thousands" of hours of movies in standard- and high-definition format for set-tops as well as connected devices such as PCs, tablets and smartphones. Avail-TVN has already notched ViewNow distribution deals for Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ) FiOS and Redbox Instant By Verizon, a subscription multi-screen movie service slated for a national launch early next year. ViewNow uses adaptive bitrate (ABR) to ensure that the video steams continue to flow even as bandwidth levels fluctuate. (See Verizon/Redbox Take a Swing at Netflix.)

Content delivery network (CDN) giant Akamai Technologies Inc. (Nasdaq: AKAM) is going back to its roots with word that company founder and Chief Scientist Dr. Tom Leighton will be elevated to CEO effective Jan. 1, 2013. Leighton, who co-founded Akamai in 1998, will succeed Paul Sagan, who announced plans earlier this year that he would step down by the end of 2013. Leighton and Sagan will both remain Akamai directors, with Sagan taking on the additional role of senior advisor.

— Jeff Baumgartner, Site Editor, Light Reading Cable