Liberty Latin America (LiLA) said Monday that it has restructured its executive team, removing the role of chief operating officer, allowing leaders of its individual units -- Cable & Wireless, VTR and Liberty Puerto Rico -- to report directly to company CEO Balan Nair. In addition, LiLA said it has added two new positions to the executive team -- SVP, south central markets and chief customer officer. 

“Last year, we learned so much about ourselves and our business, and we have been evaluating how we operate, how we are structured, how we delight our customers, and how we continue to evolve in a changing environment,” Nair said in a press release. “Our new structure will bring an even greater focus on our customers, provide fresh perspectives in different areas of the business, and importantly, give our leaders the opportunity for growth.”

Liberty Latin America was spun off from Liberty Global in 2018. The company operates in more than 20 countries across Latin America and the Caribbean under brands such as VTR, Flow, Liberty, Más Móvil, BTC, UTS and Cabletica.

Nair added that Liberty Latin America is actively recruiting a chief customer officer who will align the company’s customer focused initiatives and lead its existing digital, customer care, and programming teams.”

Guillermo Ponce, previously CEO of VTR, the company’s Chilean operation, has been named SVP, south-central markets, covering Liberty Latin America’s Panama and Costa Rica operations. Ponce has more than 25 years experience in the telecommunications industry. Taking over as general manager of VTR will be LiLA chief technology officer Vivek Khemka, who will relocate from LiLA headquarters in Denver to VTR HQ in Santiago, Chile. He joined Liberty Latin America in 2018. As part of that change, LiLA said it also is searching for a new CTO. In the interim,  chief information officer Christine Weber will assume day-to-day CTO responsibilities. 

Former LiLA chief operating officer Betzalel Kenigsztein has been named executive director and general manager of Cable & Wireless Panama, replacing Julio Spiegel. Spiegel will take a new role within Liberty Latin America as VP, government affairs reporting to the general counsel.

Liberty Global said it has named former TiVo CEO Enrique Rodriguez executive vice president and chief technology officer, taking the spot left vacant after former CTO Balan Nair was promoted to head up Liberty Global’s Latin American operation in January. 

Rodriguez will start his new position in late July. Since January, Baptiest Coopmans has filled in as interim CTO. He will remain with the company as senior vice president, operations.

“Enrique is a seasoned executive who will hit the ground running on day one,” Liberty Global CEO Mike Fries said in a statement. “In today's technology environment the best CTOs have worked across sectors, platforms and geographies. Enrique has C-level experience as an engineer, software developer and operator. …I'm particularly excited to tap into Enrique's knowledge of video products and platforms as we ramp up innovation in our TV business. He’s the right leader at the right time for Liberty Global.”

Rodriguez will lead Liberty Global’s Technology & Innovation (T&I) team of more than 7,500 employees, with an annual operating and capital budget of more than $5 billion.

Rodriguez was named CEO of TiVo in 2017. Prior to that, he has managed multi-billion dollar businesses for companies like AT&T, Microsoft, Cisco and Thomson, and has a long history in digital television as well as the European broadband sector.

As head of Microsoft's Connected TV business, he launched IPTV solutions for telecommunication companies around the world. At AT&T Rodriguez was responsible for the teams that developed and launched its OTT service, DirecTV Now.

Rodriguez will lead Liberty Global’s Technology & Innovation (T&I) team of more than 7,500 employees, with an annual operating and capital budget of more than $5 billion. The centralized technology function powers the IT, supply chain, product development and delivery and network platforms across Liberty's operating companies, working across countries and brands to help them succeed. Liberty Global’s standardized approach to its portfolio of software and hardware, which includes the Horizon TV platform and state-of-the-art Connect WiFi routers, plays a critical role in optimizing operational efficiency and delivering a consistently superior experience to Liberty's 22 million customers in Europe.

“This is an exciting time to join Liberty Global,” Rodriguez said in a statement. “It is one of the few companies in our sector with international scale, a long-term commitment to technology leadership, and a track record of consistent growth and value creation. Mike and his team are first class operators and I look forward to accelerating product innovation and building the network capacity that European consumers want and demand.”

For the first time, the lights of Broadway will shine on The Cable Center’s newest Cable Hall of Fame class.

Five executives and a groundbreaking television show — AMC’s drug-dealer drama Breaking Bad — will share the stage of New York’s Ziegfeld Ballroom on Wednesday, April 4, for the 2018 Cable Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Lending more star wattage to the festivities will be host Carla Hall, a popular cooking personality from ABC’s The Chew and Bravo’s Top Chef and Top Chef America.

Among the industry figures set to be enshrined are Nomi Bergman, president, Advance/Newhouse; John Bickham, president and chief operating officer, Charter Communications; Balan Nair, president and CEO, Liberty Latin America; Richard Plepler, chairman and CEO, HBO; and Neil Smit, vice chairman, Comcast Corp.

June Travis, a former NCTA executive, will also be presented with the group’s Bresnan Ethics in Business Award. Breaking Bad creator, head writer and executive producer Vince Gilligan will accept Hall of Fame honors on the AMC show’s behalf.

Nomi Bergman
President, Advance/Newhouse

Second-generation cable executive Nomi Bergman didn’t intend to get into the family business. After graduating from the University of Rochester with a degree in statistics and economics, Bergman went to work as a systems consultant in Arthur Andersen & Co.’s consulting division. Bergman’s father, Robert Miron, ran the Newhouse cable companies, and a cousin at parent company Advance/Newhouse encouraged her to join the larger organization’s internal consulting group. As an analyst with Advance/Newhouse, Bergman worked on instituting best practices and operating efficiencies among the company’s publications and cable divisions.

In the late 1980s, her group installed new accounting systems at company properties. Noticing that the various cable operations used a variety of billing systems, she recommended integrating them. She took charge of what would be a two-year project involving 50 system conversions. She became a cable nomad, setting up camp in each Newhouse location to oversee successive rollouts. The odyssey was an immersion in MSO field operations that convinced Bergman to make her professional home in cable at Advance/Newhouse. (The company formed a partnership with Time Warner Cable in 1995.)

Bergman adapted quickly to the architecture side of the cable business. Among her most satisfying achievements was being part of the launch of RoadRunner, Time Warner’s broadband internet service. “Being a part of reinventing the purpose of a cable system … re-architecting service delivery, growing the team, was beyond exciting,” she said.

Bergman helped launch sixth-ranked MSO Bright House Networks in 2003 and served as the company’s president from 2007-16. Today, as senior executive officer with Advance/Newhouse companies, she focuses on corporate development and strategic partnerships.

The busy executive and mother of three daughters has been a force in a number of cable and community support organizations, and she remains actively involved with several. Her work on the board of Adaptive Spirit grew out of a mother-daughter activity that became an annual tradition. “Watching [U.S. Paralympic Ski Team members] embrace their disabilities as their star qualities and become exceptional athletes is incredibly inspiring,” Bergman said. “It’s a powerful metaphor for us all — about how to live our lives and be our best selves.”

She believes in the value of kindness in all aspects of life. “People trust kind and caring leaders,” she said, and feels these qualities helped her to cultivate dedicated fearless, and knowledgeable teams who felt empowered to win.

John Bickham
President and Chief Operating Officer, Charter Communications

John Bickham’s career has taken him from the utility industry in Texas to the cable C-suite in Connecticut. Born in Corpus Christi, he graduated from Texas A&I — now part of the Texas A&M system — but had no idea where he would go from there. He landed at utility holding company Houston Industries, where he helped design and build coal-fired generating stations. In 13 years with the company, he was involved in utility regulation at the national and state levels. In the mid-1980s, the holding company became interested in cable and went into partnership with ATC. Bickham’s accidental entry into the cable business was the start of a long, successful career.

Compared to the staid world of utilities, Bickham found cable “an immature business, unsophisticated from a business planning and construction standpoint. It was different, it was fun, and you were a lot closer to the cash register.” Thirty years ago, “who knew the business was going to be what it is today? Today … we sell services that every home and business needs.” In 1986, he co-founded KBLCOM, a cable company that partnered with ATC and owned cable systems in eight states. He left as president and chief operating officer of KBLCOM to operate Time Warner Cable’s Los Angeles division, and advanced to executive vice president of TWC, overseeing the company’s operations in North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas.

Bickham moved to Cablevision Systems in 2004 as president of cable and communications. He joined Charter as COO in 2012 and added president to his title in 2016 when the company’s acquisition of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks closed. In the cable industry, local operations continue while the owners change; at Charter, Bickham has gotten reacquainted with cable systems that he previously led at KBLCOM.

The father of two grown daughters, Bickham enjoys spending time with his four-year-old grandson. And he travels the world in pursuit of game birds — to England, Spain and South America, as well as in the U.S.

Bickham advises the industry’s future leaders to take every opportunity to learn the different aspects of the business, especially as companies grow and jobs become more tightly focused. “Don’t limit yourself,” he urged. “Don’t ever get bored with what you’re doing. Move around in your company; experience different things.”

Breaking Bad
Television Drama Series, AMC, Vince Gilligan, creator

Only on cable could a series that starts with a cancer diagnosis and continues into the darkest corners of the methamphetamine industry find a home. Breaking Bad broke new ground in television drama and demonstrated the possibilities of innovative storytelling.

The series premiered on AMC in 2008 and ended in 2013. It tells the story of Walter White, a New Mexico chemistry teacher who, with two years left to live and a desire to secure his family’s financial security, becomes a powerful meth manufacturer.

Series creator Vince Gilligan envisioned an approach that had never been tried in series television: a “show about change” that began with a definite end point in view. Gilligan is a TV fan who streams shows from the 1950s and ‘60s and observed, “The thing TV has done very well is tell an indefinite story — a story that can go on for 20 years [a la Gunsmoke or NCIS]. And the way to do that, from a writer’s point of view, is not to put the characters through too many personal changes … I figured stasis had been tried with great success for 50 years, and something more dynamic in terms of character would be interesting. But that meant it couldn’t last indefinitely.” Gilligan was well aware that the concept of a finite series would be difficult to sell. “That’s why I’m still amazed that Sony and AMC signed on. … You don’t want to be told from the get-go, ‘This thing probably won’t last long enough for you to make your money back.’ ”

Not only does Walter White change, but unlike other TV heroes or anti-heroes, he changes for the worse, as the series title suggests. Legend has it that Gilligan pitched his idea to AMC as “turning Mr. Chips into Scarface.” Another unusual approach: in the moral universe of Breaking Bad, actions have consequences. Ultimately, characters reap what they sow, and nobody gets away with anything.

Gilligan believes television drama continues to change, and he hopes it will continue to pursue shows designed for more than the same demographic sweet spot. Above all, he wants writers to be bold. “Don’t copy off your neighbor’s exam,” he said. “Don’t pay too much attention to the stories other folks are telling; tell a story that excites you.”

Balan Nair
President and CEO, Liberty Latin America

“My life is 95% luck,” said Balan Nair. “Making the most of opportunities takes a little bit of skill, but to get those opportunities [takes luck]. I’m a very lucky man.” What Nair calls luck, others might see as destiny.

In his 11 years with Liberty Global, Nair has advocated focusing on software as the driver of cable’s evolution and he’s met the challenge of harmonizing products, services, workforce and networks across multiple countries, languages and regulatory environments. Named CEO of Liberty Latin America late last year, he is now focused on high-potential markets in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Nair grew up in Malaysia, coming to the U.S. in 1985 to study electrical engineering at Iowa State University. He met his wife at Iowa State — an event he believes was the greatest stroke of luck in a fortunate life. He began his career working on high-voltage power transmission, and discovered an aptitude for writing software. His wife worked at telephone company USWest in Iowa, and when she was transferred to Minneapolis, he followed and found work at a power research company. When another USWest transfer came up, this time to Denver, Nair switched from power to telco, and joined USWest himself. In more than 12 years with the company and its successor, Qwest Communications International, he rose up the leadership ladder to become chief information officer and chief technology officer.

With extensive telco experience under his belt, Nair decided to move on to the fast-growing internet world. He joined AOL as chief technology officer, overseeing technology, IT and network operations. The Nairs left Denver for AOL headquarters in Washington, D.C. Given his experience, Nair was well-positioned for an industry that saw its future in both areas. Liberty Global came calling in 2007, and the family happily returned to Denver.

As a cable industry newcomer, Nair saw a huge opportunity. He “immediately saw the advantage cable had over any other telecommunications business. We had better networks, better platforms and we were better suited for the transition to a software world. We also have a perpetual entrepreneurial spirit. The founding members [of the industry] are still involved, and our second-generation managers were trained by founders. That is very special.”

Richard Plepler
Chairman and CEO, HBO

It’s safe to assume that Richard Plepler is the only high-ranking cable executive whose entry into the industry came about through a chance meeting with a U.N. ambassador at a Chinese restaurant. To start at the beginning: Plepler grew up in the ’60s in a politically active home where engaged, informed citizenship was paramount. “At the dinner table, you had to have read The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, and you had to be prepared to talk about the world,” he recalled.

After graduating from Franklin & Marshall College, he went to work for Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.). From Dodd, he learned about building consensus and the notion that people can disagree without being disagreeable. “I think that informed the way I began to think about business, and I think it informs my leadership style,” Plepler said.

Plepler next went on to work for a small media-consulting firm that specialized in crisis management. After a year, brimming with confidence at 26, he started his own strategy and production firm, RLP International, which would make films to help countries that wanted to improve their images. Cheerfully acknowledging his own youthful hubris, Plepler is quick to point out that he was RLP International’s sole employee.

His big break came at a Chinese restaurant in New York in 1988, where then-Israeli ambassador to the U.N. Benjamin Netanyahu happened to be dining. “I went over to introduce myself, and I said, ‘You have a huge problem in the U.S.’ The first intifada had broken out, and Israel was being viewed negatively. I told Netanyahu, ‘This needs to be put in a larger context, sir, and my company, RLP International, knows how to do that.’ And by some miracle, he said, ‘Come see me.’ ” The result of their subsequent meeting was a well-received documentary for PBS that explained the complexity of Israel’s situation. A call from HBO’s Michael Fuchs soon followed, inviting Plepler to join the network in 1992 as communications chief.

“From my first day [at HBO], I always felt like I was where I belonged,” Plepler said. “The people I’ve observed who have done the best feel they’re in the environment where they’re meant to be. Be in the place where you feel passionate about the work, about the mission.”

Neil Smit
Vice Chairman, Comcast Corp.

Growing up on a farm in Connecticut, Neil Smit didn’t have a clear idea of what he wanted to be when he grew up, but he knew what he didn’t want to do. Farming was at the top of that list; construction was second. “My father was in construction, and I didn’t necessarily want to be the second generation in the construction business,” he said. “I wanted to carve my own path.” He entertained notions of becoming an astronaut, but after graduating from Duke University, he ended up on sea, air and land as a member of the legendary Navy SEALs.

From his five-and-a-half years as a SEAL, Smit learned important lessons that he applied to his subsequent business career. “The first thing you learn in SEAL teams is, it’s all about teams,” he said. “If you’re not pulling together, you’re pulling apart, and you do everything together as a team. The other thing is that you communicate very directly from day one. And finally, you’re always developing your skills, your people, and you have to keep building new capabilities. More than anything, it’s about the teamwork.”

When Smit retired from the Navy as a lieutenant commander, he worked in hostage negotiations before moving into the corporate world. He held leadership roles at Nabisco and Pillsbury, and then moved to AOL and MapQuest. Along the way, he got to know Paul Allen, who invited him to join Charter Communications as CEO in 2005. Cable appealed to him. “The day-to-day diversity of things that we had to deal with was interesting,” he recalled. “We were in the internet business, the phone business, the video business, and it was an ever-changing environment.” Another plus: “The quality of the people was very high; there’s still an entrepreneurial spirit in the industry,” he said.

Smit joined Comcast Cable as president and CEO in 2010. He now serves as a vice chairman of Comcast Corp., working to develop future technology- oriented business opportunities. Active in his community, he recently left the board of trustees of Philadelphia Children’s Hospital, and continues his work with the board of visitors for the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. And his adventurous spirit remains strong. He enjoys boating, water sports and skiing, and recently took up ice driving with his son in northern Canada. “I’ll try about anything,” he said.

Bresnan Award Recipient

June E. Travis

June Travis retired from the cable television industry in late 1999. Since 1994, she had served as executive vice president and chief operating officer of the National Cable Television Association, the industry’s principal trade association based in Washington, D.C.

Prior to joining the NCTA, Travis was president and chief operating officer of Rifkin & Associates, a Denver-based cable television operator. Before that, she served in several executive positions at American Television and Communications, the predecessor to Time Warner Cable.

Recalling the days when cable was a much smaller business, Travis said the industry’s ethical core was apparent in the relationships between its leaders. The early entrepreneurs “were very competitive with one another, but if attacked from the outside, they circled the wagons and supported one another. The collegiality was palpable.”

Starting her cable career as a secretary, Travis noted the admirable leadership qualities she saw practiced by industry role models. “I kept thinking, ‘Gee, if I ever get into management, that’s how I would like to manage, that’s how I would like to be involved in the community, that’s how I would like to give back.’ ”

Travis has served as an officer and board member of a number of cable television industry boards, including CommScope, NCTA (now NCTA: The Internet & Television Association), C-SPAN, Cable in the Classroom, TeleCorps and Women in Cable (now Women in Cable Telecommunications). She chaired the industry’s political action committee, CablePAC, for nine years. She said such organizations made a tremendous difference to the industry’s employees.

She has been active in a number of Colorado organizations including the Greater Denver Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors, the Colorado Forum, the Colorado Women’s Forum, the National Jewish Center, Inter-Faith Community Services, Young Americans Center for Financial Education and the Dumb Friends League. She recently stepped down as chairman of the board of the Daniels Fund but remains on that board and also serves as a trustee for the Denver Center for the Performing Arts.

Travis believes in business leaders’ responsibility to their communities. “It’s huge,” she said. “And it pays back a hundred-fold. If you are genuinely in the community, not for the recognition, but truly caring, and participating, and supporting the community, you can’t buy that kind of customer respect.”

Balan Nair, the chief technology and innovation officer at Liberty Global, has been appointed president and CEO of the company’s Latin American and Caribbean operation, and will take that role once the unit is split-off from Liberty Global.

Liberty Global expects to complete that split-off of that unit as a separate, public company around the end of the year.

Liberty Global said a search for a successor to Nair in the CTO role is underway. Nair will remain in his current position at the company until the split-off is completed.

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Nair, who has been overseeing a workforce of 7,500 and a capital budget of $5 billion-plus in as Liberty Global’s CTO, currently sits on the boards of Charter Communications and Adtran, and is co-chair of Energy 2020, an SCTE/ISBE initiative dedicated to reducing cable’s network power requirements.

“Balan is an exceptional technologist and operating executive who has delivered tremendous value to our company as CTO,” Mike Fries, Liberty Global’s CEO, who will serve as executive chairman of the Latin American unit of the company, said in a statement. “He has led us into the future with next-generation broadband, video and mobile products, and has transformed our entire technology operating model. I am excited that Balan has agreed to lead this new company into the future, and I look forward to continuing our close working relationship as part of the broader Liberty family.”

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“It’s been a privilege to work with and learn from Mike Fries and John Malone, and I am proud and humbled to have the opportunity to continue collaborating with them in my new role as President and CEO of Liberty’s Latin American and Caribbean operation,” Nair added. “I plan to leverage my experience to build operating and strategic momentum for us in one of the world’s most exciting growth markets.”

In addition to Fries and Nair, the board of the new company is expected to include John Malone, currently chairman of Liberty Global; Liberty Global directors Paul Gould and Miranda Curtis; and Liberty Global CFO Charles Bracken.

Liberty Global said it has also identified three additional directors -- Eric Zinterhofer, lead independent director and former chairman of Charter Communications; Alfonso de Angoitia, Co-CEO of Grupo Televisa N.A.; and Brendan Paddick, former board member of Cable & Wireless Communications Plc, and founder and former CEO of Columbus Communications.

PHILADELPHIA — The old axiom that the only constant is change was in play at last week’s annual SCTE/ISBE Cable-Tec Expo, as operators keyed on new technologies and platforms that will drive the industry forward in the years ahead.

And many of those discussions and new products aren’t emerging just to help technology take a leap forward for technology’s sake, but because MSOs will need them to keep their future business models from breaking.

With that as the backdrop, workshops, panels and keynotes spanned cable’s engineering gamut, but there was a particular emphasis this year around areas such as network virtualization and distributed access architectures, multiyear power savings and reduction initiatives, as well as next-generation, speedy platforms like DOCSIS3.1, and a new annex for D3.1 in the works called Full- Duplex DOCSIS.

THE FUTURE WILL BE VIRTUALIZED

The industry’s shift to distributed and virtualized networks is one that is not just filling a technology gap, but one that apparently will be necessary from a business perspective as MSOs are required to tack on capacity to keep up with the bandwidth demands of consumers and business customers alike.

An opening session panel featuring top industry engineering executives offered some hard truths on why distributed architectures and the virtualization of network functions have rapidly moved to the forefront of cable’s tech agenda.

Boiled down: Older, legacy models, driven by purpose-built hardware, simply won’t work anymore.

There’s a huge “disconnect” between the data that people are consuming and what cable operators must spend to keep up with that demand, Balan Nair, executive vice president and chief technology officer of Liberty Global, said in a wide-ranging panel session that was moderated by Bob Stanzione, executive chairman and board chairman of Arris.

In terms of network capacity planning, Liberty Global is already allocating enough bandwidth to deliver an average of about 1 Mbps per sub. With annual capacity growth in the range of 30% to 40% per year, it won’t be long before that hits 2 Mbps per subscriber.

For Liberty Global, that would equate to about 25 8-MHz-wide channels, or “like half of our whole plant,” Nair said. This trend causes MSOs to keep “feeding this beast” with capital just to expand capacity to stay ahead, he said.

“That’s a problem for all of us,” he said. “That’s not sustainable.” And it doesn’t add up with a business that grows revenue at 4% to 5% per year. “Eventually, it breaks,” Nair said. “The math will never work.”

The historic practice of buying specialized devices from traditional suppliers that cost a lot to build and buy won’t work anymore. “That model has to change,” Nair said.

The shift is toward cheap, commodity hardware running on very specialized software.

“So, we’re going to ask our vendors to think about the software and to run it on some cheap hardware because, at the current rate, it’s not sustainable,” he said.

Vendors appear to have gotten that message loud and clear. Last week, Nokia, Casa Systems and Harmonic all announced virtualized versions of Converged Cable Access Platforms that can work in tandem with distributed architectures that move away from traditional monolithic access devices.

Fellow panelist Jim Blackley, executive vice president of engineering and IT at Charter Communications, called Nair’s characterization of the situation “spot on and accurate.”

He added that, when it comes to capital, “you can’t spend it everywhere. … You can’t spend it in the home and spend it in the network and spend it on content and all of the other things we need to deal with.”

It’s also important to think about virtualizing the functions of the consumer premisesequipment (CPE) and move the compute, storage, encryption, and packaging into cloud-based centralized systems, he said.

Charter is moving in that direction with ActiveVideo (a vendor it owns as part of a joint venture with Arris). Virtualizing the CPE means “you can put out devices that will last longer,” Blackley said. “The reality of our business is, the day you [deploy] something, it’s legacy.”

He said Charter is a “huge fan” of network virtualization and separating out the MAC and PHY elements.

Zoran Stakic, executive vice president and chief technology officer of Shaw Communications, said he’s also keying on these trends and listening to partners on “how the future is going to land.”

But when it comes to a move toward virtualization, “the starting point becomes remote PHY,” he said. “The old model is not sustainable. It’s not a choice really, anymore.”

Nair said the migration to software-driven models is one of his top worries. “It requires a skill-set change in all of our businesses,” he said. “The change is not just the skill sets in our employee base, but the skill sets of our vendor base as well.”

Vendors, meanwhile, prefer to innovate on their own platforms. The interests of the two sides might not match up, and that could become a source of tension.

Nair thinks it’s best to solve that problem, “or else you’re going to see more and more operators building their own stuff, and that won’t be very good for the industry.”

The industry is starting to see MSOs exert influence on products and product road maps in other creative ways. Last week, Harmonic joined a growing group of vendors to ink warrant agreements with Comcast that give the MSO an opportunity to buy shares in those suppliers based on product sales and deployment milestones.

The warrants agreement is based on specific sales to Comcast and other “deployment milestones” involving products such as Harmonic’s new CableOS virtual CCAP platform.

Comcast has similar warrants deals with key suppliers such as Arris and Universal Electronics, a key supplier for Comcast’s voice remote for the X1 platform.

FILLING NEED FOR MORE SPEED

The panel also focused on the turn toward Gigabit-level billboard broadband speeds — something that is seemingly morphing into an option cable operators must make available for consumers, whether the vast majority of them actually need it.

Still, Nair doesn’t see 1-Gig going “mainstream” until 2018 or 2019. By that, he means it won’t become a “bullseye” product for Liberty Global that is backed heavily by marketing and promotion. Today, that’s relegated to the operator’s 250-Mbps product, he said.

“We’re looking at increasing it,” Nair said, noting that MSOs have the luxury to press two levers with broadband — price and speed — while competitors with less robust networks can only fiddle with price. “Speed wins.”

Blackley said Charter is already getting positioned for the 1-Gig future. Its all-digital migration is freeing up capacity and Charter is also plunging fiber deeper into the network.

He added, “It’s not just about speeds; it’s about latency, and it’s not just about inhome; it’s out of home.”

Blackley hesitated to say when consumers will actually need 1-Gig speeds, but said he won’t be surprised to see it happen eventually. “Like your garage, if you build it, it will get filled,” he said.

Stakic, meanwhile, warned against “irrational behaviors” occurring in the United States, largely “triggered by Google,” that might cause MSOs to rush prematurely to 1-Gig.

He questioned if adoption rates will be high enough to justify the returns, noting that there aren’t many apps now that require three-digit megabit speeds at this point, let alone 1-Gig.

DOCSIS 3.1: BELIEVE THE HYPE

The DOCSIS 3.1 era is in its early days, but the results so far indicate that the new multi-Gigabit platform for HFC networks is delivering on its promises, particularity when it comes to producing gigabit-class speeds alongside improved bandwidth-efficiency.

All 3.1-based modems have shown they can support a Gigabit-class service, initially in the downstream path, no matter the modulation profile the device is using, Jorge Salinger, vice president of access architecture at Comcast, explained during a workshop that offered a status report on DOCSIS 3.1’s deployment progress.

As a quick recap, DOCSIS 3.1 is designed to be 50% more bandwidth efficient (from a bits-per-hertz-per-second perspective) than DOCSIS 3.0 via the use of blocks of tiny OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) subcarriers in tandem with an improved forward error correction scheme called Low-Density Parity Check (LDPC).

Comcast now has “hundreds” of customers online with DOCSIS 3.1 in markets such as Nashville, Chicago and Atlanta, where Comcast is conducting advanced market trials-of the technology, he said.

Those initial, solid performance results are important, because DOCSIS 3.1 modems and cable modem termination systems (CMTSs) can dynamically tap into multiple “modulation profiles” (up to 4086 QAM) depending on the condition of the spectrum they’re using. The use of OFDM subcarriers for DOCSIS 3.1 enables operators to shift to different modulation profiles depending on the signal-to-noise ratio that’s present in the spectrum.

Operators will be able to set up multiple profiles that can be adjusted “multiple times per day” as new automated tools to manage them enter the market, Salinger said, noting that 3.1 modems are set up for five modulation profiles (four, plus one for testing), while CMTSs can handle 16 modulation profiles per downstream per service group.

Midco has also seen promising results from its early D3.1 trial work in Fargo, N.D., the first of many as the MSO looks to offer gigabit speeds to all subscribers by the end of 2017.

DOCSIS 3.1 “worked well in the lab, it worked well in the field,” Jason Miller, technical marketing engineer at Cisco Systems, which has been working with Midco on the trial, said.

In the Fargo trial, Midco used a 144-MHz block of OFDM combined with eight DOCSIS 3.0 single-carrier QAM channels and produced sustained downstream speeds of about 1.57 Gbps.

Jay Rolls, senior vice president and chief technology officer at Charter Communications and session moderator, wondered if operators would need a legion of gurus to operationalize DOCSIS 3.1, which is still a relatively new technology for the industry.

Salinger stressed that MSOs will need to adjust their operations for DOCSIS 3.1, particularly in areas such as installation and maintenance.

He also acknowledged that setting up multiple modulation profiles is a “daunting task,” noting that it takes time — sometimes a week — to do that by hand, “and we’re good at it.”

However, he said, tools are being created to automate that process on a continual basis, and he expects them to be ready for deployment this quarter.

Further out on the horizon is Full Duplex, a coming annex to DOCSIS 3.1 that will create a “dual use” band that will help cable operators deliver multi-Gigabit symmetrical speeds. Under the current spectrum model, spectrum for the upstream and downstream are split; Full Duplex will allow upstream and downstream traffic to travel in the same block of spectrum.

CableLabs announced that project, called “Full Duplex” (FDX) DOCSIS, in February. If all goes to plan, FDX is poised to become an extension to the DOCSIS 3.1 specs sometime next year, Belal Hamzeh, vice president of wireless technology at CableLabs, said in a recent interview.

There’s an expectation that existing DOCSIS 3.0 bands will not overlap with the FDX band, but those implementations will vary from one operator to another and perhaps even within the same operator, Hamzeh said.

Tom Cloonan, chief technology of network solutions at Arris, said spectrum allocation for an eventual migration to FDX is still an active discussion among MSOs and vendors.

However, a possible deployment scenario could see an MSO set aside a band for the legacy DOCSISupstream (at 5-85 MHz or 5-100 MHz), another band for the legacy downstream (perhaps at 700 MHz to 1.2 GHz), with a band sandwiched in the middle (say, 100 MHz to 700 MHz) that’s dedicated to the FDX operation.

“There might be some variations there, but at a high level, that’s the kind of spectrum some people are talking about,” Cloonan said, noting that FDX could be initially targeted to plant that has already deployed N+0 along with a move to remote/distributed architectures that move the PHY or the MAC and PHY closer to the edge.

Though the specs for FDX are still in f lux, Cloonan said there’s some optimism that the technology could be ready by as early as 2018, but sees 2019 as the year when it sees its true heyday.

“There’s a force-function to make it happen quickly,” he said. “At a very high level, there’s an awful lot of interest in Full-Duplex DOCSIS among the MSO community.”

Cisco Systems is also placing bets on FDX. Last month, Cisco introduced a silicon reference design for Full-Duplex DOCSIS alongside a pledge to contribute the design on a royalty-free basis to the cable industry to accelerate the speed of the technology’s development and eventual deployment.

Nokia, meanwhile, has also been keeping its fingers on the pulse of FDX. It demonstrated a prototype of the concept, calling it “XG-CABLE,” in May at the INTX show in Boston.

Denver On Deck

Cable-Tec Expo 2017 is set to run Oct. 17-20 in Denver, and carry the theme, “The Big Deal,” with a focus on new technologies that can power next-gen services.

SCTE/ISBE has tapped Terry Cordova, executive vice president and chief technology officer of AlticeUSA, and Charter’s Jim Blackley to co-chair the program committee for next year’s show.

SIDEBAR: Werner Calls for Industry Innovation, Collaboration

PHILADELPHIA — Calling 2016 a “foundational year” for the industry, 2017 is poised to be the year of “innovation and collaboration,” Tony Werner, president, technology and product for Comcast Cable, said in opening remarks at the show.

On the foundational side, he noted examples such as the closing of the Charter Communications- Time Warner Cable merger, with Charter now pushing ahead with a cohesive technology and service plan that covers the combined company’s new, broader footprint.

“I think the industry has got a very solid year under [its] belt,” Werner said, pointing to cable’s continued broadband growth, with accelerated rollouts of multi-Gigabit DOCSIS 3.1 technology on the horizon.

2017 is “the year that we can seize as an industry,” added Werner, who last week was re-elected as chairman of the SCTE/ISBE board for the 2016-2017 term. “The wind is at our back as we go into 2017, and I think it’s the time for us to really capitalize as an industry and as a society. … The industry has gotten knocked a few years back that we couldn’t innovate. I think we’re showing everyone that’s not true.”

Reiterating next year’s anticipated theme for MSOs, Werner said the industry’s “secret weapon” is its ability to work together.

“We collaborate, we work across,” he said. “We are not competitors, at present … It allows us to punch above our weight, which I think is so absolutely critical.”

He also presented what he said are key ingredients for the industry’s future success.

Chief among them, again, was collaboration, with Werner giving some credit to X1, Comcast’s cloud-based platform, which relies on agile and DevOps models, attracting top engineering talent and creating a culture and environment “where people like to show up and work…and build great products on top of powerful platforms.”

And Comcast is collaborating outside of its ecosystem, Werner reminded the crowd, pointing to syndication deals it has with Cox Communications and Shaw Communications.

“The collaboration back and forth [with those partners] is powerful,” Werner said.

— Jeff Baumgartner

SIDEBAR: Energy2020 in ‘Show Me the Money’ Phase

PHILADELPHIA — The Energy2020 community met on Tuesday at Cable- Tec Expo for its third annual progress report, saying that in “show me the money” terms, the initiative is working. But with only three years or so until the “2020” part of Energy2020, there’s still a ton to do.

“What the SCTE has done with Energy2020 is extremely critical,” said Balan Nair, CTO of Liberty Global and a co-founder of the program. “If we can hit the goals stated, it will make a huge difference — to us, to our management teams, to our customers.”

The initiative’s four stated goals: To reduce power consumption by 20% (on a per unit basis), cut energy costs by 25% (also on a per unit basis), optimize tech facilities and data centers by 20%, and reduce grid dependency by 10%. All of that, by 2020.

“We’re the engineers … and like any good engineer, you don’t build something for waste,” Nair said.

So far, the savings are small, but poised to grow. Dan Cooper, chair of the SCTE’s Sustainability Management Subcommittee, noted $12.5 million in energy savings since last year, ”which, compared to what we all spend on energy, isn’t a big number, but it’s a start.”

Cooper highlighted two new Charter-initiated efforts since the last E2020 update, both solar: A partnership with two utility companies in upstate New York to provide 12 Megawatts of renewable energy, estimated to save $5-plus million over the life of the project, and a new national data center in Charlotte, N.C., where the use of solar energy will offset 10% of annual energy costs.

“The key is that it’s not always capital intensive to move the bar” on energy efficiency, he said.

Sam Khola, senior manager of sustainability for Liberty Global, and the recipient of this year’s Energy2020 award, noted that energy costs are “already colossal, and they’re not staying level — year over year, they grow.” That’s what prompted Liberty’s work with Phase Changing Materials (PCMs) — a sort of thermal battery that works by capturing and storing a structure’s heat (in this case, hub sites) during the day, then discharging it at night.

“When we talked here last year, it was a tiny implementation in one of the 14 countries we serve,” Khola said. But after Liberty saw a 33% reduction in TCO, and a 43% improvement in energy efficiency, an expansion plan was evident. “The plan is to expand both geographically [beyond the Netherlands, to Ireland and the U.K.], and technologically,” Khola said.

Comcast, which typically experiences 4% growth in annual energy costs, kicked off an overhaul of its utility bill management and energy procurement processes, said Daniel Marut, director of national sustainability. “With over 200,000 utility accounts, it can be a little overwhelming for an accounts payable team, whose role is to pay the bill,” he said.

That’s what prompted a systematic way of auditing outside plant, to get an accurate count of power supplies, to start. “The idea is to systemically eliminate costs that are incurred by just basic mistakes in utility bill processing,” Marut said.

— Leslie Ellis

This isn’t your father’s “cable” industry anymore. In fact, the word cable is no longer spelled out in the name of the NCTA, which last week rebranded as NCTA-The Internet & Television Association.

But that also means that what used to be true about “cable” operators is no longer true today. Rather than focusing on one new product or service at a time, these new-class service operators have to juggle twelve balls at once in order to keep up with consumer demands and the competition.

To get a fix on what’s important as many people in the tech- and engineering-facing part of the industry converge on Philadelphia for this week’s SCTE/ISBE Cable-Tec Expo, Multichannel News technology editor Jeff Baumgartner and Leslie Ellis, independent analyst and regular MCN contributor, caught up with some of the top engineering minds in the industry to discuss their priorities and to drill down into hot areas such as DOCSIS 3.1, wireless and mobile broadband, next-generation video, network virtualization and the shift to DevOps models.

What follows is an edited, transcript compiled from separate conversations with Kevin Hart, executive vice president and chief technology officer of Cox Communications; Balan Nair, EVP and CTO of Liberty Global; and Sree Kotay, who was recently promoted to CTO and EVP of Comcast Cable.

Related: The Long Goodbye

TECHNOLOGY PRIORITIES

MCN:Let’s level-set the conversation with your technological priorities. What are the top one or two things on your to-do list for Q4 and the rest of the year?

Sree Kotay: Really? Only one or two? One is, we want to continue to lean in to building elegant, differentiated products. We’ve been focused on building better products and services, and that focus has had a profound positive effect. We’ve done a lot of that for TV, and want to do it for other services, across the board. So you’ll see us putting in foundations and building blocks this year, for some big things we’ll do next year.

Two is the customer experience, with a real focus on simplification and self-service. It’s an intense focus on how we engage with our customers — starting from the acquisition funnel, throughout the engagement — whether it’s self-installs or enabling people to resolve issues themselves. It’s an effort we’re internally calling “All Digital.” It’s about giving our customers a powerful blend of self-service, transparency and visibility.

Balan Nair: Right now, it’s mostly operational. If you really want to be a few steps ahead — and all trends indicate this — you have to change. Change is hard, but it’s mandatory. Mark Twain said that the only person who likes change is a wet baby. He’s right.

We’re in the middle of a company-wide transformation that we call “Liberty Go.” It’s about putting the customer front-of-mind, completely. Customer first, front of mind, sides of mind, back of mind. For real — to the point of making the Net Promoter Score (NPS) metric part of performance bonuses.

Kevin Hart: First and foremost is our network transformation plan. We’re putting together a 10-year network transformation plan with the hallmarks being around DOCSIS 3.1, Node+0 architectures — taking fiber deep — and then eventually leveraging Full Duplex [DOCSIS].

No. 2 is our strategy around trying to own the home, better enable the home, better enable the customer experience. Things like our new WiFi offering that we’re launching called Panoramic WiFi. It’s also the work that we’re doing on new Contour, our new video experience, and we’re continuing to make great progress with Cox Homelife, our home security/automation platform.

MCN:Can you elaborate on the foundations and building blocks in the works?

Kotay: On the technology side, it’s obviously all the DOCSIS 3.1 work, looking at broadband and our XB6 [Gigabit gateway], which comes out of a lot of work on RDK-B, where the “B” stands for “broadband.” It’s radically improving visibility as a functionality to move up the value chain. As we think about connected services, that’s one big element. In particular, we’re focused on digital relationships, and evolving to serve the people in the house, not only the household address.

HOT TOPICS IN TECH

MCN:WiFi: The hype machine around “smarter WiFi” and “intelligent WiFi” is pretty loud. What factors go into building a competitively superior WiFi service offering?

Kotay: If you look up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, with self-actualization at the top, and air, water, food and shelter at the bottom — there seems to be a new element in that bottom slice, and it’s WiFi. And the thing is, when people say “WiFi,” they usually mean “end-to-end connectivity:” My device is online, it’s working and I can get to the services I want.

A lot of previous approaches have been focused on slivers of that problem. We fell into that category — well, you’re connected with the CMTS, so you should be good! But the reality is, you have to look at the whole chain. It’s not just the access layer, or the in-home things like speed and reach. It’s the data centers, the back-end services, the care and the end-to-end-ness of it.

For instance, if you have a gaming console connected over WiFi to my gateway, I should know it’s a gaming console, what kind of console it is and whether there are any issues impacting its connectivity, whether on our end or somewhere else in the chain. The Internet is inherently a best-effort service. So we have to think about how to make it more than that — more carrier-grade, in a sense. Like broadcast video quality, in that it really, really works, all the time. It’s not just about any sliver of that chain. It’s the whole end to end. Our industry is uniquely positioned to tackle that challenge, but it takes a significant amount of focus and attention.

So the lesson to us was, let’s stop thinking about it as just WiFi. “WiFi” has to mean all of it.

Nair: People say content is king. My boss likes to say that connectivity is king, and content is Kong. WiFi is obviously a big part of “connectivity.” The world is moving away from single-point WiFi access. We’ll have to look at a mesh network in the home, to achieve a very high quality of service. Step 1, we improve quality at the chip level; 2, improve the antenna(s). Next, embed the software that enables us to optimize things like beam-forming. All of that enables us to do a whole-home, holistic WiFi view.

MCN:Kevin, tell us a bit more about this PanoramicWiFi offering.

Hart: Eighty percent to 90% of the devices connected in the home are enabled by WiFi by our customer base. Enabling a better in-home WiFi experience is top of our list. Panoramic WiFi will have a tagline of, “It’s wall-to-wall fast.”

We’ll be implementing some of the best-in-class WiFi gateway routers and will be leveraging over time the RDK-B component within those routers. We’ll be installing extenders, depending on the size of the room and the [performance] of the signal quality, and focus on ease-of-use.

We’re also going to be accompanying that with some additional focus from our techs in terms of the setup, giving them more set-up time to ensure quality of service and signal strength

We’re launching that in the fourth quarter, in our California market, and then we’ll be taking it more broadly in 2017.

WIRELESS AND GIGABITS

MCN:Multiple choice, with LTE-U and its impact on Wi-Fi capacity: 1.) Battle stations!; 2.) If only that were my biggest wireless concern! 3.) Don’t worry, MuLTEFire will fix everything.

Nair: We have to look at this from two sides — as a WiFi provider, and as a mobile business operator. Which means my answer is a little bit of all three. It’s “battle stations,” because if connectivity is king and it goes away, that’s a real problem. It’s certainly not our only wireless concern. That said, I’m confident that our collective work with MuLTEFire and other standards bodies will help. [Liberty Global and CableLabs announced last week they have joined the MuLTEFire Alliance.]

Hart: I think it’s No. 2. I think there has been a lot of good work with the different organizations, including CableLabs and the Wi-Fi Alliance, to sort out some of the interoperability and co-existing requirements of LTE-U. I’m pretty sure that’s going to work itself out over time.

I think trying to drive that in-home WiFi experience and also continue to build out our WiFi footprint where it makes sense are some of the things that are at the top of our list. And we’re also keeping an eye on some of the advances of 5G from a wireless standpoint. It’s both an opportunity for us and also a potential threat.

MCN:Gigs and competition: Two years ago, we asked (some of you, anyway) about Google Fiber’s threat to expand to a bunch more metros. Now, Google Fiber is being dragged through the mud by the Silicon Valley press, suggesting trouble in Google Fiber-ville. How does (or doesn’t) that impact your Gigabit deployment and/or “fiber deeper” strategies?

Hart: We launched our G1GABLAST product a couple of years ago and have had some really great success with that. Obviously, Google’s not the only one building out fiber. There’s AT&T and many, many others. That specifically hasn’t had that big of an impact. We’ve always been committed to investing in our network, building out ubiquitous speeds and making sure we can deliver at peak hours with minimal congestion.

I mentioned the 10-year network transformation plan: Starting right now and into next year, DOCSIS 3.1 is high on our radar, so we’re making great strides with the testing, deployment and trials of 3.1.

We definitely have a fiber-deep strategy and an N+0 architecture that we’re working towards. We’ll be doing that both to keep up with speed and contention and just to deliver a better quality of service. And taking fiber deep is also key to enable Full Duplex, ultimately, which will come after 3.1 to enable more symmetrical Gig speeds.

Yes, we’ll definitely keep our eyes open on the competitive landscape, but we’re going to keep doing what we’ve been doing for a couple of decades and keep investing in our network.

Nair: We’re big on Gigs. Our bull’s-eye product right now is about 200 Mbps. At a traffic engineering level, though, our peak downstream usage is in the 900 Megabit-per-second range in some markets. 920 Mbps is pretty close to 1 Gig. If you consider a serving area with 2,000 homes, at 50% penetration, times 1 Mbps, guess what? That’s a Gig. Which is pretty much 25 DOCSIS channels. If that goes to 2 Gigs, that’s 50 DOCSIS channels. We have 100. That’s why we spend a lot of time on this.

DEEP DIVE ON DOCSIS

MCN:DOCSIS 3.1: Status report please, for DOCSIS 3.1-based deployments — CPE [customer premises equipment] and CMTS [cable modem termination systems]? Anything notably different from prior DOCSIS upgrades?

Kotay: We’ve launched D3.1 service in Atlanta, Nashville and Chicago, with more coming this year and next. We think our XB6 is the next big vision of connectivity, with DOCSIS 3.1 at the heart of it.

Nair: Short version is, we’re in market and nearly done with CMTS. CPE begins next year.

Hart: We’ve got the 3.1 CMTS platforms up and running. We’ve got probably 50 different types of CPE that are working beautifully with the CMTS. Most of those are 3.0, so we’re testing out the backwards compatibility.

It will be similar in many respects to DOCSIS upgrades in the past, but with the introduction of OFDM [Orthogonal Frequency Division Modulation], there will be a little bit of navigation in terms of the complexity. But we’re feeling pretty good about it and the early results are very solid.

MCN:Advanced Class question: Full-Duplex DOCSIS, or fiber-deeper? Or both?

Hart: It’s both, and from our perspective it’s fiber-deeper first. To enable concurrency on 3.1, we’ll continue to take fiber deeper and then get the full benefit of Full Duplex, depending on the service group size in any given market.

The other component is the remote PHY [initiative] as part of the fiber-deeper strategy and moving those electronics closer to the customer. That provides additional optionality to upgrade to Full Duplex and it also provides more optionality in the future potentially for some wireless [technology] in the remote cabinet if need be.

Kotay: We don’t look at these sorts of technologies as competing with one another as much as we see them as increasingly powerful tools in an increasingly large toolbox. Today, we’re offering Gigabit Pro, a 2-Gig symmetrical fiber-to-the-home service across our footprint, as well as D3.1-powered gigabit service in several markets, with more to come. For green-field development and MDUs [multiple dwelling units], fiber is often the best tool, but DOCSIS 3.1 and the forthcoming Full Duplex provide great flexibility to deliver gigabit speeds using our HFC network.

Nair: It’s not an either-or situation. We like them both. We’ll do fiber — we’re doing fiber — where it makes sense and, as it turns out, it makes sense in lots of places for us. Full Duplex DOCSIS means building for symmetrical bandwidth. Symmetrical DOCSIS is more a question of “when” than “if.” That’s because right now, we’re still delivering much more traffic to homes than from them — it’s asymmetrical. Going to node+0 (amplifiers) aligns us all for Full Duplex DOCSIS. So, whether it’s customer-generated content or the next OTT-like thing, it means we don’t have to swap out that last bit of coax.

MCN:4K, UltraHD, High Dynamic Range/HDR, wide-color gamut, 10-bit interleaving: What of all of this matters to you? How is it best harnessed to improve the life of people watching TV?

Nair: Of that list, HDR is more impactful than just “plain” 4K. However, only 4K televisions have HDR, so they’re kind of inter-linked in that way. We’re launching HDR as something that comes with our 4K service. It came out in an earnings call as “EOS,” but that’s more of an internal project name — it’s cloud-based and will roll out in the U.K. first.

Kotay: We’ve done a lot of testing. You can see our view reflected in our product strategy. Short version is, all those things you listed are good things. There’s just nothing bad about increasing resolution and so on. But the ones we’re most focused on right now from a technical standpoint are HDR and wide color gamut.

We can show you some 1080p HDR video that looks better than 4K non-HDR. Do you remember when you first saw HD, next to a standard definition TV? It was, whoa, that’s much better. HDR is the same. You don’t realize you haven’t seen a blue sky on your TV until you’ve seen it in HDR.

Hart: To me, HEVC [High Efficiency Video Coding], the new video compression, that’s equally important. It’s really being able to move that content around no matter what flavor it is from an efficiency perspective to preserve some of the bandwidth. I think all of those — 4K, HDR, etc. — are going to be important. What the consumers want and what the manufacturers can provide will work itself out based on the content that’s produced. To me, the concern is how to transport all that information in the most efficient way.

BANDWIDTH TRENDS

MCN: It wouldn’t be a CTO conversation without talking bandwidth. What’s the latest in broadband usage trend lines? (E.g., is the growth of the growth still in decline? Are there patterns worth noting?)

Hart: CAGR [compound annual growth rate] on the downstream, in terms of utilization, is about 49% to 50%, and that’s what we continue to model in our investment plan. From an upstream standpoint, we’re probably in the 27%-28% range. We’ll probably see that move into 30% or so. With all of the cloud-hosted solutions and cloud-managed solutions, it puts a lot more pressure on the upstream.

Nair: We’re seeing peak speeds growing — and they’re growing logarithmically. That keeps our attention. The main driver now is still video. With video, we used to have very large bundles, with smaller content libraries. The world is going to smaller bundles, with larger libraries of content.

Kotay: We double our network capacity every 18 to 24 months on average, and that has remained relatively constant. We can realize some efficiencies by doing less over the backbone and driving more regionalization, but as long as consumers’ demand for rich, powerful online and video experiences continues to grow, and the quality of those experiences continues to improve, we know we need to stay one step ahead of what’s next.

MCN:At what point is entertainment video not the bulkiest passenger on broadband? What other bandwidth-insatiable things on the horizon have your full attention?

Hart: We’ve always been a leader with business services; Cox Business is going to hit the $2 billion revenue mark this year. I think there will be some additional applications and managed services, hosted solutions that will start to eat a lot of bandwidth but deliver a lot of value.

Maybe perhaps longer-term, there’s virtual and augmented reality — those could be a huge driver if they take off.

Kotay: I think the Internet is experiencing a lot more social video as a form of communication. This includes things like Facebook Live, Periscope, Vine, quick clips. I think we’re still pretty far from video not being the bulkiest thing we carry, but we are seeing a rise in other forms. The good news is that compression improvements can help offset that.

Other things we’re seeing, with the preponderance of smartphones and devices, are more firmware updates. They’re bursty, but they can be materially significant. When a new game launches, that can be a big, bursty thing. Video is more consistent. It’s bulkier, yes, but more consistent and predictable.

So if you look at downloads, entertainment video will be a huge chunk for the next few years. However, as far as peak demand, we’ll likely see a continued rise in firmware updates and games — things happening in the background.

MCN:What’s the situation around the possibility of widening the spectrum above 1.2 GHz? Is it time to raise the roof around here?

Hart: I think in the near-term we’re in good shape without having to widen. It’s something we’re always evaluating and reviewing. If you’re going to be making some enhancements to the network, it makes good sense to try to future-proof it, but probably not here in the near term on that particular component.

MCN:Widening the upstream path: How do you think through when it’s time to do so? What’s the situation now?

Hart: The good news is that a fiber deep strategy helps to address some of the upstream bandwidth by decreasing the service group size. That’s going to buy us a little more runway than we had thought when considering mid-splits and high-splits options.

For now, we’re in pretty good shape with our strategy. With the mid-split maneuver, you’ve got a massive CPE implication; that’s where a ton of costs could be. I think we’re in pretty good shape today with our N+O strategy.

IN THE HOME

MCN:RDK, the Reference Design Kit, has a new profile: Broadband. What should people know about it?

Nair: The RDK started with video. The RDK is expanding, so it got segmented to “RDK-V.” The next one is focused on broadband, which is why you hear about “RDKB.” It’s a little tricky because the letters “V” and “B” sound very similar when spoken!

Regardless, RDK-V is how we got to a user experience that satisfies, on many levels. Comcast started it with X1. We’re onboard, so is Cox, Shaw [Communications] and a growing global footprint. RDK, no matter the letter behind it, is the for-real open source platform behind the platform.

RDK-B reinforces connectivity being king. Everything we deploy will be RDK.

Hart: I think RDK-B has a lot of the same promise [as RDK’s video profile] in terms of speed to market, good economics in terms of the open source and keeping it open to multiple vendors.

The other piece is the functionality and capability to do remote installation and monitoring and repairs, and some of the tools … will be a differentiator. And with the new tools coming out, ease of use is another big benefit of RDK-B.

Kotay: It’s this — broadband is a two-way network, but as an industry we’ve been relatively blind to the connectivity in the home. The feature sets for routers and broadband devices have been relatively static for 10, 15 years.

It’s analogous to video services, in a way: It used to be all about channels. Channels are still important, but there’s a lot more to it. Same thing for broadband: It used to be all about speed. Speed will continue to be important, but it becomes more than just that.

Things like RDK-B will be central to be able to understanding what’s going on, and responding to that understanding. Whole-home WiFi is a good example: It’s about putting a lot more visibility and tools into the hands of our customers.

MCN:Kevin, give us an update on where Cox is with the RDK video profile [Cox’s new Contour platform uses the RDK and syndicates Comcast’s X1 platform]. Any shareable Net Promoter Score or other metrics or anecdotes? In NPS parlance: Would you recommend it to a friend?

Hart: It’s been a huge success for us. We’re, of course, partnered with Tony [Werner, president, technology and product at Comcast] and his team. But it’s also what we’ve done to enable it for ourselves. We probably did two to three times the amount of integration work on this.

It’s definitely been a home run. In the first couple of months, we’ve already [surpassed] 400,000 subscribers. We’re moving quite rapidly in terms of our deployment relevant to our initial plans and expectations. And the customer feedback has been off the charts. The NPS is multiples in terms of some of the other legacy platforms that we have.

The ease-of-use has had a nice halo effect, much like G1GABLAST had for our Internet service. Within just a few months, we’ve been able to achieve the same overall level of performance of the platform around tuning, etc., that it took Comcast and many others many years to achieve. We get some of the benefits of their learnings, but we’ve been able to do that within our ecosystem.

MCN:What’s your approach to devices — those you provide and those customers bring and attach to you?

Kotay: If you went back four, five years — that’s when we started looking at having to build software and apps as more of an opportunity than a burden. Over the past two or three years, we’ve had the same shift with hardware. In our industry it used to be, oh, we have to provide a box, to do conditional access and some navigation, and we have to provide a cable modem, to do HSD [high-speed data].

It reminds me of [astronaut] Alan Shepard, when he was sitting in the spaceship, ready to take off, and was asked what he was thinking. He said he was thinking about “the fact that every part of this ship was built by the lowest bidder.”

The funny part was, while we were thinking that way, a lot of innovative companies were devoting a lot of effort to getting devices into the living room where we already had a foothold. I think it made all of us sit up and say: What if it’s not just about having product for an ISP or a cable provider? What if it’s about making the best product, period?

In the last couple of years, we’ve gotten a lot of religion about that and we’re seeing the rewards, in terms of customer satisfaction and retention with products like X1 and our X1 voice remote. Over the next year, you’ll see us continuing along that path with products like our Xi5 wireless set-top box and XB6 home gateway. The goal is simple: make products people love.

OUTSIDE OF THE HOME

MCN:How do you answer this question when your bosses ask it: What does 5G mean to us?

Nair: It means highly distributed, small cells with a mix of licensed and unlicensed spectrum. In some ways, it’s a credible threat. In other ways, it’s an opportunity. It’s an opportunity because it’s coming out of mobile and all those small cells will need backhaul. We do backhaul. Ultimately, it’s a hype bubble at the moment — we think it’s more of a 2020 thing.

Hart: As you know, the majority of wireless traffic is facilitated by wireline, so there’s a lot of backhaul opportunities for us to partner with our carrier customers. As that becomes more prevalent and that becomes more pervasive, they’re going to need to leverage networks like ours and others in the MSO community.

As it related to leveraging it as a last couple of hundred of feet fixed wireless methodology, we’ll have the same opportunity to take advantage of that, particularly with some of the remote PHY components. We could potentially leverage some of that infrastructure with strand-mounted small cells as well.

There’s definitely a place for 5G and we think it’s both an opportunity that can help with the backhaul but also even potentially leverage ourselves. And we feel that the product that we already deliver is very competitive and will continue to stay ahead of the performance from a throughput and speed and connectivity standpoint.

MCN:Enterprise services: What’s the hot seller to commercial businesses right now? What does it take to go after the large enterprise crowd — to roll up the sleeves against Verizon and AT&T and the like?

Hart: We still have plenty of opportunity within the small-to-medium businesses within our footprint, so we’re continuing to stay focused there. Our IP Centrex hosted voice solutions are selling great right now. We’ve also got great opportunity with schools, government, our hospitality network and convention centers, and we’re looking to go a bit further upmarket over time. In many cases, there are probably opportunities to partner with other MSOs, because many of those larger enterprises span multiple geographies, sometimes not always directly within our footprint.

Kotay: Business services is a major and growing segment for us, and a focus for a lot of really cool innovation on the product side. As just one example that I’m excited about, we’ve been putting a lot of effort behind cloud enablement. Mid-market and enterprise customers, in particular, need bandwidth and solutions engineered to enable their move to cloud services.

Earlier this year, Comcast Business announced that it is providing businesses with direct connectivity to Amazon Web Services, which, as we all know, is one of the leading providers of cloud services in the world. As that group continues to move upstream and serve large, national enterprises with dispersed office locations and data centers, you’ll continue to see them make more news with major cloud providers.

Nair: It depends on the size of the business. In general, small and medium businesses are really interested in a high-quality, dedicated IP interface, in the range of 500 Megabits per second to a Gig. It goes on from there to hosted voice, layer 3 VPN, and eventually to an SDN-type solution.

IN THE CLOUD

MCN:What are the important elements in building a video cloud — dos and don’ts? Where is each of your respective companies, with respect to a cloud-based video offering?

Nair: I’ll go with “do” rather than ”don’t.” Do pick the right vendor. Two, make sure the vendor isn’t bullshitting you. Third, do make sure the vendor delivers.

Our path to cloud-DVR started with putting the navigation in the cloud. Then we put VOD in the cloud. Third is putting DVR in the cloud. That’s the progression that’s worked for us.

MCN:Kevin, you have options for the new Contour. Any plans underway to enable a cloud DVR service?

Hart: It’s on our product roadmap for next year. That being said, there’s been some mixed results in terms of customer uptake on the platform. Some of the things we’re working our way through are the content and the copyright components with some of the content providers. We’re still trying to work some of those models out.

The other piece is the economics. Setting up our own specific cloud DVR solution, the economics would be a little steep. We’re looking at a couple of different partners to provide some flexibility there. Some of the economic models from Cisco [Systems] and some other providers are becoming a little bit more nimble, agile and affordable and more “by the drink,” if you will. I think there will be some advances … that will allow us to make more progress on it. We’re evaluating it.

MCN:Where are you with virtualization, generally or specifically?

Kotay: I think virtualization has gotten fetishized. It’s not an answer to all problems. It’s a critical tool in the toolbox, yes. But, for example, some of the stuff we’re doing around containers isn’t virtualized, because they don’t need to be. There’s no elasticity in that workload, so, the less layers and complexity, the better.

Virtualization is important, and we need it in some areas, but it’s not the only tool. Of course, in some areas, virtualization technologies can deliver powerful benefits in terms of network performance and reliability. We’ve been pushing more programmability into the network for years, and have seen the benefit of that approach.

Hart: We are making a lot of progress on our virtualization plan, virtualizing from a hardware and software perspective and software-as-a-service and becoming much more nimble in terms of the things we do on a cloud-based way in which we leverage technology and leverage our products and services.

Nair: At a core level, we’re looking at SDN [software-defined networking] and NFV [network functions virtualization]. Both have significant and practical benefits. Benefits like providing dynamic bandwidth: clearly important. What comes with that tends to be economic and efficiency gains. That said, we do understand the challenges virtualization poses to our key vendors.

MCN:DevOps — What is it, why does it matter, and to what extent are your companies pursuing it?

Hart: We were working some DevOps opportunities last year, but we kind of went all-in earlier this year. We did a bit of an organizational realignment to create a true DevOps team that combined all of the development and IT operations team, and co-located a lot of our business stakeholders.

The speed-to-market, the learning, the quality, the feedback we’re getting from our stakeholders has exceeded my expectations in terms of the way our teams have embraced it and what they’ve learned from their counterparts that are now part of their same team members, and just the pace and scale and quality of what we’re delivering around multiple platforms. I actually thought there would be a bit more of a resistance, culturally, from the teams, but it’s been embraced.

We’re extending it not just to our traditional technology DevOps model, but we’ve had some major data center moves, so we’re applying DevOps methodologies to physical moves as opposed to just some of the virtual and technology development and making it more of a mindset in how we do business.

Kotay: We’re huge on it. There are two or three reasons why it matters. The biggest is, it creates the right culture of autonomy and accountability. Put another way, the people who cause the pain have to deal with the pain!

The rate of change is only increasing, so the whole idea of sequential handoffs — formally document your requirements, formally hand them off to the design group, which hands off to the engineering group, which does the test cases and hands it off to QA, then to integration and test, then to deployment, then to support — there was a time and a place when that made sense. There are still cases where it makes sense, actually — hardware work is still very much a “waterfall.”

But being there on the DevOps side, supporting the triage elements that come with RDK-B, and being deeply involved all the way through product and process … DevOps still blows my mind. It changes everything, with everything that means. We wouldn’t be where we are without it.

Nair: DevOps matters if you’ve adopted an agile software methodology, and you’re building a lot of your own code. In other words, if you’ve decided to own your stuff. If you choose to do your own build framework and you’re writing code — because you want transparency and control of whatever your situation is — then the model works.

CLOSING QUESTION

MCN:What disruptors or potential disruptors are on your radar right now?

Hart: For the disruptor component, it’s about keeping our eye around 5G in the fixed wireless space and how do we capitalize on that emerging technology, particularly around MDUs and commercial businesses?

It’s not very glamorous, but regarding special projects, it’s about working on process excellence and customer experience and putting the right set of tools and customer self-care and navigational flows within our call center and field services. It’s a lot of process work, but we’ve got to codify that within some of our technology tools. It can help to distinguish ourselves and continue to separate from some competitors.

Kotay: I’ll take “potential disruptors,” in the context of the Internet of Things. I find it interesting that at this point in 2016, IoT [the Internet of things] still has so much headroom to grow. And that growth, when it accelerates, will create interesting dynamics.

If you think about the connectivity axis and look at power consumption, bandwidth and range, there’s an interesting gap. For lack of a better term, call it the narrowband space, for instance. It creates an environment for things with aren’t hard on batteries and very long range, in terms of miles. Their bandwidth requirements are medium at best, like for M2M [machine-to-machine communications]. I don’t know if it’s disruptive, but it feels like there’s something interesting there.

Another I’m still constantly watching are display surfaces. They’re also ripe for disruption, more in the five-to-eight-year horizon. I don’t know if it’s flexible displays or cheaper displays, but it feels like we’ll have a lot more screens in our lives, and not just mobile. Fixed screens too.

Nair: I’ll take disruptors. Primarily, disruptors really are those competitors who aren’t interested in profitability — for five-plus years. That’s a long time.

New Orleans — More than any single force shaping the television and broadband industry, technology is driving the biggest change.

Engineers and executives steeped in hardware and software acronyms, domestic and international, picked apart the biggest challenges faced by the industry, spanning mobile, multi-gigabit broadband, the IP video transition and a host of others, at the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers Cable-Tec Expo in New Orleans last week.

Waxing Wireless

While U.S. cable operators are leaning heavily on WiFi to lead their wireless strategies, Liberty Global has also been pushing hard on quad-play offerings that tie in the MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) model.

Mobile “is becoming the primary computing device,” Balan Nair, the MSO’s executive vice president and chief technology officer, said during a presentation about technology trends and how the operator is handling new forms of competition.

Liberty Global now has about 4.5 million mobile subscribers through its MVNO relationships (that subscriber number is expected to grow to 8 million through the MSO’s M&A activity). Nair said Long Term Evolution (LTE) allows for seamless connectivity, and the technology is on the road to delivering gigabit capacities.

“LTE is here to stay,” Nair said.

But WiFi “is becoming a bigger and bigger part of our story going forward,” he said, noting that delivering a good WiFi experience in the home matters more to many consumers than the wired broadband pipe connecting the home itself.

Nair also shed some light on Liberty Global’s future plans, telling the crowd the MSO is working on its first “WiFi-first” device, which would prefer WiFi access when it’s available and seamlessly fall back to the LTE mobile network when it’s not.

Enabling that seamless transition “is not an easy thing to do,” Nair allowed, adding that Liberty Global expects to introduce the WiFi-first product toward the fourth quarter of 2016.

During the follow-up panel moderated by Cox Communications president Pat Esser, Nair outlined four ways cable operators can enter the mobile game — they can build and operate the network themselves (if they have spectrum); buy another mobile provider; launch a “lite” MVNO whereby the MSO is relegated as a reseller; or introduce a “full” MVNO play where the operator builds out the mobile “core,” keeps call control and essentially rents access to the radios and base stations.

Liberty Global has tried out all four, and Nair was direct about the issues cable operators face with the home-grown route.

“I’ll tell you, building sucks,” he said. Though Liberty Global was able to obtain spectrum relatively cheaply, the MSO shut down its home-grown network about 18 months after launching it.

He said Liberty Global has found the most success, from an operational and economic standpoint, with the full MVNO approach, which allows the operator to control the SIM card that goes in the smartphone.

“In the end, it’s about handsets and price,” he said, noting that he puts the lite MVNO on the “bottom of the list” because the operator has no control — it’s just about renting and selling.

Nair also talked up the positive effect quad-play bundles have on customer retention.

“Over time, the churn rate is discernable between a quad-play and a non quad-play,” he said. “There’s a downside, though. If you screw up with mobile, you lose all four — you lose the whole quad-play.”

Service Agility, IP Video, Cybersecurity

The technology chiefs jumped to other topics during Wednesday’s conversation, including service agility, customer-centricity, the all-IP progression and cybersecurity.

Comcast, fresh off the national rollout of its voice remote, will launch an add-on called “X1 Answers” in mid-November, MSO executive vice president and CTO Tony Werner said.

“You’ll be able to ask, ‘What was the Broncos score?’ ‘How tall is the Empire State Building?’ I think it’s going to change a lot of things,” he said.

The transition to all-IP is foundational to proactive change, Werner and others said. By this time next year, Comcast will have deployed 8 million pure- IP set-tops, which matters to serving video on second screens.

“We have the same number of baby boomers as millennials right now, and the millennials are watching a lot more content on mobile,” Werner said. “If we have 24 million customer relationships and 15 million video starts in a week [on mobile devices] — that’s exponential, and it will probably only continue to grow. If you don’t have video over IP, you’re going to miss a big part of the audience — and it’s a growing part, not a shrinking part.”

Rolling out more features and services more quickly is a big priority for all network operators, execs said.

Liberty Global, which is deploying only Reference Design Kit-based devices and will begin converting to HEVC (High-Efficiency Video Codec) for 4K/Ultra HD video next year, will get to service agility using defined and publishable APIs (Application Program Interfaces), Nair said.

“I just want to build a stack that has almost every functionality covered by APIs — it’s a big transition for us,” Nair said.

For Nomi Bergman, president of Bright House Networks, the near-term product future includes more 10-Gigabit EPON (Ethernet Passive Optical Network), with an eye toward 100-G EPON. “We’re now helping to create the standard for that,” she said.” Also hot in BHN markets: Its “Echo”-branded whole-home WiFi solution.

“It represents a really nice collaboration between the technology, product and marketing teams,” she said.

On the heels of Tuesday’s Cybersecurity Symposium, Nair described a massive hack in the Netherlands, where 2 million broadband connections were shut down, two nights in a row. The four perpetrators were arrested a couple of weeks ago, and the incident caused Liberty to overhaul its crisis handling mechanisms.

“In dealing with communications, law enforcement, regulatory, PR — as it turned out, what we had wasn’t the most easily translatable during a crisis. We had to rebuild a lot of our processes,” Nair said.

Panelists were also asked to discuss some things they’re working on today. Phil McKinney, president and CEO of CableLabs, said his thinking tends to gravitate to what’s coming tomorrow, noting that his group has been focused on “exponential technologies” — things that are outside the scope of the traditional planning cycle.

He said he worries about “what’s beyond the horizon … so that we don’t get surprised.”

Read more news from SCTE Cable-Tec Expo.

In these days of hyper-competition on all fronts of the multichannel-TV industry, technology truly rules. Bigger broadband, better video, more mobility and continuous improvement are key. Only the strong will survive. Ahead of the annual SCTE Cable-Tec Expo, Multichannel News technology analyst Leslie Ellis checked in with three top chief technology officers — Cox Communications’s Kevin Hart, Liberty Global’s Balan Nair and Comcast’s Tony Werner — on such timely topics as industry consolidation, capacity expansion and what it takes to move at “Web speed,” like cable’s new over-the-top competitors. They also drilled into chewy tech trends like wireless and LTE-Unlicensed, the “Gigabuzz-o-rama,” the Reference Design Kit (RDK) and, of course, DOCSIS 3.1. An edited transcript follows.

MCN: Merger-itaville! Consolidation is happening in a very big way this year. To what extent is it impacting your technical and engineering life/work?

Kevin Hart: Navigating the shifting waters around our vendor-supplier ecosystems — that probably has me thinking a little longer. In the short term, there can be implications: Perhaps they lose focus on product support or on backing up programs that are in place. As we continue to say, Cox is not for sale. But there are definite implications on how we think and operate. You’ll see additional partnering opportunities that we’ll pursue to leverage scale from a product standpoint.

Balan Nair: Scale is important in our business. We need it to be competitive; it brings great opportunities in our ability to do big things. Remember, we’re up against companies with global reach, with much larger balance sheets. Innovation and keeping up in product development and consumer behavioral changes are getting more complicated and more capital-intensive.

MCN: A lot of good stuff is happening behind the scenes these days that’s all about finding and fixing problems before they reach customers. What’s your favorite customer-care tool these days?

KH: We have multiple roadmaps around this. One example is a tool where we’ve leveraged Agile [methodologies] — Home View. It’s an internal tool, currently, that lets us see the performance and QoS [quality of service] of set-top boxes, modems and end devices within the home. From that, we can provide better self-care by feeding some aspects of the internal Home View app into [subscribers’] “My Account” view, or enable a proactive reset, or a fine-tune or software upgrades. We’re starting to deploy it. It will really help us to improve the user experience and mitigate both calls and truck rolls.

BN: I’m with Kevin.

Tony Werner: We’ve made transforming the customer experience a focus throughout the company, so it would be impossible to briefly summarize everything we’re doing. That said, I’m really excited about the continued evolution of our “My Account” app, which gives our customers pinpoint control over their accounts, and greatly reduces the need for calls and even service visits. What’s great about the app is that it’s an app — and like any app, we can continually update and expand it. One of the features we recently debuted, and are launching nationwide in the next few months, is our Tech ETA feature. It lets people see where their service technician is, en route, on an interactive map — similar to what folks have come to expect with online car services.

MCN: Netflix, Hulu, Amazon — they’re all companies that grew up on broadband, and as such are natively “agile” and “DevOps.” What’s the status of those Web-side development concepts in your organizations?

BN: Yes, we have to work faster. Unquestionably, DevOps and all the other related buzzwords are important and happening.

TW: Agile and DevOps are both very real to us, and really form the foundation of the innovative product development model we’ve adopted over the past five years. We work those development concepts every day, whether in the form of fast-paced product-development “sprints” or cross-functional tiger teams that bring together design, engineering and product experts in lean, fast-moving leadership groups. I think our commitment to those development principles stands with the very best of Silicon Valley, and is evidenced in a product like [cloud-based video platform] X1, which is updated at Web speed and frequency in a way that delivers new products and services. Xfinity Games and Xfinity Share are just two that we unveiled this past calendar year.

KH: We too have really leaned in on those particular practices to put them into operation over the last year and a half. We’ve rolled out the agile methodology, and we’re seeing great returns. Our “target state” website, which is the internal name of our e-commerce program — that’s agile. Sprint after sprint, we’re adding new capabilities, based on real customer feedback.

As for DevOps, earlier this year I moved to an integrated organizational structure around DevOps, and combining Tier 1 and Tier 2 [resources]. For video, voice and high-speed data, I co-located the development and operations teams around those platforms, with one, single end-to-end owner.

MCN: Was it painful?

KH: To be honest, I was concerned about the organization’s ability to adapt to the new model. So I was pleasantly surprised to see how pleased our people have been. The co-location, the structure, the tools — every one wants to deliver better services. That’s the goal, and we’re doing that. But to your point, some of the tools and techniques to integrate DevOps into the daily norm are still coming along.

BN: But it will be more painful to ignore this shift!

MCN: What does it take to be technologically competitive in these times?

KH: Great question. I’ve been here four and a half years or so. The rate of change within the MSO space, from a technology perspective, is now on par with the technological competitive landscape. It wasn’t always that way. We’re now competing against some of the largest technology players on the face of the Earth. We need to continuously improve our feedback loops, evaluate trends and architect platforms. And we have to do that in tight sync with our chief marketing and chief product officers and their teams.

TW: First and foremost, it requires a will to innovate, which in turn requires a willingness to disrupt your own processes and preconceptions. A product like X1 exists because a small team here started with a basic premise — “We can make this better.” It’s an ethos that I’m committed to cultivating throughout our product-development process. When you start from a position of wanting to constantly improve and build better mousetraps, the rest is just effort and execution.

BN: It takes amazing luck, forecasting of technology trends, understanding what Apple and Google are doing — and being able to predict what they are going to do. And allocating resources to the right projects. And on and on!

MCN: On to some nitty-gritty tech issues. WiFi and LTE-U/LAA: It has the potential to seriously disrupt WiFi connectivity. On a scale of 1-10 — where 1 is, “Relax, everything’s going to be OK,” and 10 is “battle stations, brace for impact!” — where are you?

KH: Up until recently, I was closer to the 8-9 range, because of the uncertainties about how the process is unfolding. Now, I’m trending toward a 6 or 7. We’re hanging our hat on LAA [Licensed Assisted Access], the international standard. We think it’s more WiFi-friendly. There are also some tailwinds around [Qualcomm’s] muLTEfire [wireless-broadband] approach. It’s more equal — it enables us to have a bit more of a level playing field, as it relates to the control plane of the unlicensed band.

BN: I give it a 5 — it’s as much an opportunity as it is a disruption. LTE-U is going to happen. We have to figure ways to make it effective for us. It’s in the unlicensed band, so we can participate in it as well. The control plane should be in the unlicensed band, too.

MCN: One day, CableLabs tests cite a definite and deleterious impact of LTE-U on WiFi; the next day, other tests indicate no impact. What are the indicators of truth?

BN: Anytime you have different PHYs [physical layers] operating in the same spectrum, it can be a problem. CableLabs is doing a great job for us, to move it from “problem” to “opportunity.”

KH: I also think there’s a definite correlation involving the physical distance between the WiFi access point and the LTE tower. At 300 meters or so, there’s little impact on throughput. At 20 meters, you can have almost a 100% reduction in the output. So a lot of it is correlated to distance, but the standards will help.

MCN: IP video: Where are you with it, and when will your networks be “all-IP?”

BN: Our strategy is to first move the user interface, then VOD, then linear, to IP. The UI and VOD shifts are in full swing. Linear has started with our Horizon Go service, but not yet to legacy set-tops. We’ll probably start down that path in 2017.

TW: We’ve spent significant time and resources on this. Great progress so far. That said, our industry still has a good deal of work ahead before we realize the all-IP video future. Ingesting all of the assets and local channel lineups is a small part of the overall effort. Operationalizing, building all of the tools, implementing alternate content switching — it’ll take some time.

KH: All of our video distribution to second screens is IP-enabled, as is all of our VOD ecosystem. We’re about to complete the first year of a two-year plan to go all-digital. That’ll free up enough spectrum to enable our [DOCSIS] 3.1 plans. When that’s complete, at the end of ’16, we’ll follow our IP roadmap. It’ll likely take us three-plus years before we’re all-IP, but we’re on our way.

MCN: What’s the faster and more efficient way to sustainable bandwidth and capacity: DOCSIS 3.1, or fiber-deep and PON [Passive Optical Network]?

TW: Hands down, DOCSIS 3.1. With 3.1, we’re backward-compatible. Devices can be self-installed. No backhoes. Any network improvements we make in addition to DOCSIS 3.1 will only serve to enhance its capacity to deliver superfast Internet to our customers.

BN: Agree. DOCSIS 3.1 is the most efficient way; that’s a no brainer. Taking fiber deeper is definitely an option for rebuilds and upgrades. Fiber to the home [FTTH] makes sense for most new builds. Depending on the situation, we have many tools in our tool bag. D3.1 is the most cost-efficient.

KH: With our “G1GABLAST” product, which we launched about a year ago, we’ve been extending fiber deeper — all the way to the home or [multiple dwelling unit]. We’ve had pretty good success around that. It’ll still be a hybrid of both technologies [DOCSIS 3.1 and fiber-deep].

MCN: What’s the state of the state of DOCSIS 3.1? How and when does it “go to market?”

KH: What we’re hearing throughout the ecosystem is very encouraging, in terms of the speeds, spectral efficiencies, backward-compatibility to DOCSIS 3.0 and overall interoperability. I think you’ll start to see market trials and production networks in ’16. We’ll probably be late ’16 or early ’17, as we finalize the all-digital spectrum reclamation. DOCSIS 3.1 will be a key tool in the toolkit to enable Gigabit services in our broader footprint — it has a very long life ahead of it.

BN: We’re already deploying CCAP [Converged Cable Access Platform] with D3.1 capability on both the downstream and the upstream signal directions. We’ll issue a request for proposals on consumer premises equipment [CPE] later this year, with selections early next year. Deployment will be end of 2016, early 2017, depending on how long it takes to certify and trial the new devices with a new chipset.

MCN: Will it evolve like the prior versions of DOCSIS — modems and gateways first, then headend gear and CMTS [cable modem termination system]?

KH: Yes, I think that’s the expected sequence of events. I think the CPE in general is a little behind the curve, but over the next few months you’ll see changes there.

BN: Ditto.

MCN: Gigabit services: All the rage! And then there’s the reality of it: The fastest tiers are invariably the lowest subscribed. Is it a necessity or a red herring?

BN: You know, there’s lots of smoke and mirrors with Gigabit services. Our bull’s-eye product offering now is 150 Megabits per second. That’s plenty competitive, and it’s doing quite well. Gigabit is still a niche product, but I think it’ll be mainstream in about three years — mainstream for us, anyway. Our cost to get to Gigabit will be an order of magnitude less than a telco deployment, on a cost-per-passing basis.

KH: We rolled out our G1GABLAST service about a year ago, so we’re slightly ahead of the curve on that one. We’ve had a good take rate where it’s available, but not everybody needs a Gig today. As we evolve it, it will continue to gain traction. More importantly, we doubled our speeds this year on our most popular tiers, across our entire footprint. Our focus is trying to make sure we’re delivering high-quality speed, with minimized constraints, to the majority of our footprint.

MCN: What should this audience know about speed vs. throughput? KH: Speed is one thing. Concurrency of devices is another. It’s a function of the weakest link in the chain. If the WiFi router or gateway isn’t 802.11ac, speeds are going to drop — even if there’s a Gig coming into the house.

TW: Very few things need a burst rate of more than 4 to 10 Mbps, but multiple devices at low speeds do accumulate to higher traffic. We’re always engineering our networks for both burst rate and throughput. Ultimately, all of the attention around Gigabit is a very good thing for the industry and for consumers, because it drives us all to stay well ahead of the curve as we engineer the access networks of tomorrow.

MCN: The upstream path: To widen, or not to widen? If widen — when, how much and how?

BN: Upstream is important, but not as important as downstream. We are mostly a society of consumers, not publishers. So far, anyway.

KH: I think the reality of applications and the leveraging of the cloud are just putting more pressure on the upstream. We’ve seen a couple percentage points of upstream growth, year over year. Bonded channels are an option; moving the upper boundary of the upstream [from 42 MHz] is also an option. There are definitely some levers for us to pull, particularly as we take fiber deeper.

TW: The nice thing about DOCSIS 3.1 is that it allows for a higher [spectrum] split, all the way up to 204 MHz. I think we will take advantage of this in certain places. I don’t think it is absolutely required, but we have the tools.

MCN: To what extent is the RDK a part of your or your company’s day-to-day technology work?

KH: Tony and Balan are farther down the RDK path. As we leverage the X1 platform to be the user interface of our Contour 2 app, we’re moving to RDK as a part of our home architecture system. So we’ll be doing more with RDK in the future, with our video products. Also, as we continue to improve our in-home WiFi presence, we’ll be looking at RDK-B for our in-home gateway and architectural designs.

TW: I think the same advantages that we have obtained in RDK-V [for video] will be evident in RDK-B — meaning the power of a community, and the significantly faster time-to-market for new technology, and the faster release of features. Same story for both.

BN: I challenge all the other cable companies to really adopt this. RDK-V and RDK-B [broadband] are a big part of our future development. We need scale in our collective development — that way, we can drive some amazing things, together, with a common underlying stack. RDK has all of the relevant checkboxes: Open source, cloud, scale, embedded in most chips, expertise in our development community, vendor support — it leaves no reason to want to go do your own thing.

MCN: Anything in particular you’re on the lookout for at this week’s SCTE Cable-Tec Expo?

KH: I’m looking forward to seeing some of the great advances in energy conservation and disaster recovery. Cox is making several good advances in both categories, and we’ll have a few demos onsite in New Orleans. Tell your readers to check it out.

BN: Agree again with Kevin, sans the demos. As the co-chair of the Energy2020 program, I can attest — it’s big, it matters, and everybody should know more about it.

TW: Distributed access architecture — products and technologies.

Chief technology officers from Comcast and Liberty Global were among those cheering the closure of Intel’s acquisition of Lantiq, a maker of broadband access and home networking silicon.

Intel, which makes chipsets for cable set-tops and gateways as well as DOCSIS modems, announced the deal in February, noting that it will help it broaden its play into the “Internet of Things” and provide a boost to “smart routers” for the connected home.

“This acquisition enables us to extend our success in cable home gateways into DSL and fiber markets giving us full coverage of broadband access methods around the world,” Intel’s Gregory Bryant explained in this blog post. “The teams are already developing innovative ways to use our combined IP to create new products to benefit our customers, which we’ll share more about in the coming months.”

Dan Artusi, Lantiq’s CEO, now reports to Bryant -- the corporate vice president in Intel's Client Computing Group, and GM of desktop client platforms -- and lead Intel’s new Connected Home Division.

MSOs that work closely with Intel weighed in on the deal.

“We’re pleased to see Intel growing their gateway business with the purchase of Lantiq," Tony Werner, Comcast’s EVP and CTO, said in a statement. “As Comcast continues to scale our networks to gigabit speeds, we look forward to having the benefit of a common architecture across multiple access technologies that shortens development time so we can quickly deliver ultra-fast broadband experiences to our customers.” 

“We’re glad to see Intel expanding their portfolio of technologies with the Lantiq acquisition,” added Balan Nair, EVP and CTO of Liberty Global. “The combined group will be a leading supplier for broadband technologies with a comprehensive range of solutions to help us deliver ever faster connectivity to our customers.”

Arris, which makes devices that rely on Intel silicon, said the combo will bring benefits to its connected home platforms, Charles Cheever, Arris’s consumer premises equipment CTO, said.

When the deal was announced, Intel said more than 100 operators worldwide had deployed products powered by Lantiq, which has been focusing on DSL technology, including G.fast,  an emerging standard designed to bring 1-Gig capabilities to DSL. 

A concentration on new cutting-edge cable technologies, an increased focus on education and the debut of several cable new exhibitors helped drive attendance at the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers 2014 Cable-Tec Expo in Denver.

The annual technology fest, held from Sept.22-25, attracted about 9,100 attendees, the SCTE said in a statement. While that was below the 9,800 attendees to the 2013 gathering in Atlanta, a 22% increase in new exhibitors helped drive total booth takers to 376 and a pre-conference symposium on DOCSIS 3.1 and wireless technologies drew more than 500 attendees for the first time. Both the exhibitor and attendance totals represent increases over those registered in 2009, when Denver last played host to the event.

This year’s get-together also had a new focus on learning and education – the conference agenda included more than 100 hours of workshops and symposiums on three distinct tracks: Next-Generation Customer Experience; Next-Generation Video; and Next-Generation Networks.  A standing-room only crowd heard Comcast executive vice president and chief network officer John Schanz keynote the Energy 2020 session that unveiled cable’s plan to reduce energy consumption and assure energy availability by the end of the decade. The event also saw strong attendance at back-to-back sessions on DevOps, Agile Software Development and RDK.

Cable executives provided insights at the general sessions into how the industry is adapting to continue to improve the customer experience and maintain its competitive edge worldwide, and how engineering and operations professional can align their careers.  The sessions included opening remarks by Tony Werner, executive vice president and CTO of Comcast Cable Communications and the 2014 SCTE Cable-Tec Expo Program Chair; a keynote presentation by Rob Lloyd, president, development and sales for Cisco Systems, Inc.; a panel on cloud technologies; a Werner conversation with Mike Fries, president and CEO of Liberty Global; and views on career growth from Yvette Kanouff, senior vice president and general manager, Service Provider Video Software and Solutions Group, Cisco, and Mike LaJoie, executive vice president and CTO and chief network operations officer for Time Warner Cable.

“Despite unavoidable proximity to IBC and other industry events, the cable engineering community turned out in force to learn more about harnessing the new technologies that increase and ensure service availability,” said SCTE president and CEO Mark Dzuban in a statement.  “We’re grateful for the leadership of Tony Werner; the insights of Mike Fries, Rob Lloyd and our other speakers; the support of CableLabs at our DOCSIS 3.1 and Wireless symposium; and the technical resources of Comcast’s Denver Central operations. All of them—and many others—contributed to making SCTE Cable-Tec Expo 2014 the most successful educational event in our history.”

SCTE Cable-Tec Expo 2015 will be conducted Tuesday through Friday, Oct. 13-16 at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans. Liberty Global executive vice president and CTO Balan Nair will serve as Program Committee chairman for the 2015 event.

Denver – Cable Tec-Expo – Balan Nair, the executive vice president and chief technology officer of Liberty Global, has been tapped to serve as the program committee chairman for the 2015 Cable-Tec Expo, set to run from October 13-16 in New Orleans.

In that role, Nair will play a central role in programming the event, including the development of educational content the subject matter for the pre-conference symposium on Oct. 13. Nair will also take on the task as the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers looks to expand its international scope, including the recent creation of the International Society of Broadband Experts (ISBE), a brand and program that aims to globalize and unify SCTE’s training and certification resources.

Nair succeeds Tony Werner, the EVP and CTO of Comcast Cable, as program committee chairman.

“Balan Nair and Liberty Global have been unparalleled in spearheading the internationalization of cable technology,” said Mark Dzuban, president and CEO of SCTE, in a statement. “His experiences in the global marketplace will bring a unique perspective that will help us to grow the value of SCTE Cable-Tec Expo for the cable industry in the United States and abroad.”

“The educational resources of SCTE and the thought leadership of SCTE Cable-Tec Expo are accelerating the advancement of cable knowledge worldwide,” added Nair. “A key objective of the Cable-Tec Expo 2015 Program Committee will be to identify the technologies that will take cable into the future, and to create an agenda that prepares our industry to maximize the value of the changes ahead.”

Liberty Global, an operator that serves 47 million homes worldwide, is a member of SCTE’s Corporate Alliance Program, an initiative launched in April that provides additional training and education tools to operator and vendor partners and aims to boost the society’s membership base.