As America’s fixed-line telephone market continues to deflate, the Chief Executive of Embarq is making some bold predictions that his company will be able to stem the ongoing tide of subscriber losses.

Embarq president and CEO, Dan Hesse, acknowledges that competition from cable and wireless providers is a very real threat to traditional telephone companies, but says that it can be combated by improving customer and employee satisfaction, and by innovating on new services.

We lost fewer access lines in Q4/06 than we did in Q4/05, and that’s in spite of the fact that we had 50% more cable competition in terms of a percentage of our customer that had access to cable telephony, Hesse said at Citigroup’s recent Media and Telecommunications Conference. I certainly don’t want to declare victory yet because loosing any access lines (is) not a good thing, but the strategy we embarked on is paying off.

Embarq’s fixed-line customer base declined by 85,000 in the fourth quarter of 2006, compared to 89,000 in the same three-month period a year earlier.