NBCUniversal-owned WBTS-TV, Boston said it named Glenn Jones as an anchor and reporter for NBC 10 Boston News and NECN, effective Nov. 1.

He will make his on-air debut later in the month, the station said.

Jones was a general assignment reporter for the Fox affiliate in Boston from 2003 to 2006 and then moved to Bermuda, where he worked in media, tourism and government. 

“Glenn is a very talented journalist. I’m thrilled to welcome him to our NBC10 Boston news family and look forward for our audiences to see him in action reporting about our communities,” said Chris Wayland, president and general manager, NBC10 Boston, NECN, Telemundo Boston and NBC Sports Boston.

Before Boston, Jones spent four years at WBBH-TV, Fort Myers, Florida. 

I recently completed a cross-country move and, during that process, came across a lot of stuff I had long forgotten I had, including some cable tchotchkes from days of yore.

One such item was a cigar cutter from Jones Internet Channel that, if memory serves, was distributed at a cable event from the mid/late 1990s… maybe the National Show or the now-defunct The Western Show. I’m sure the marketing concept here was about it being a cutting-edge service, and I think Jones Internet Channel was trying to get other cable operators to join its program.

But, man, look at that creaky URL!

Jones Internet Channel, for those who don’t remember, was once the brand of a high-speed Internet service that Jones Intercable launched in the 1990s by industry pioneer Glenn R. Jones, who, sadly, died earlier this year. And it looks like the brand is still being used, representing the unit that “manages online technology and services for the Jones companies.”

And Jones Internet Channel was a beacon of controversy back then, as a U.S. District Court ruled that the MSO had violated a shareholders’ agreement (with BCI Telecom Holdings of Canada) by launching the service without the approval of independent directors that sat on its board at the time. Jones, which later was sold to Comcast, tried to appeal the ruling, but ultimately signed on as an affiliate of @Home Networks, the old (and long gone) ISP  that was once backed by several major MSOs and went through many waves of contention in its own right. 

So Jones Internet Channel, as an ISP, didn’t stick around for long, and the name always seemed like a bit of an odd duck. But it was technically accurate – back then, and up through DOCSIS 2.0, cable high-speed service (the downstream, anyway) was delivered over a single 6MHz-wide QAM channel that provided about 40 Mbps of total capacity.

That single-channel approach was succeeded by DOCSIS 3.0 and channel bonding, initially giving cable enough capacity to chase down the speed benchmark of the day -- 100 Mbps.  Today, top of the line D3.0 chips bond up to 32 downstream and 8 upstream channels, offering enough downstream capacity to push past 1 Gbps. Jones Internet Channels?

And now with DOCSIS 3.1 and its multi-gigabit capabilities on the horizon, the use of bonded 6MHz channels will eventually (but not for a long time) be replaced by the use of blocks of bandwidth filled with tiny bandwidth-efficient  OFDM subcarriers. So, in a sense, DOCSIS will become channel-less.  

But the name Jones Internet Channel sure seems even more appropriate now than it did back in the day. Then, usage centered on the browsing of plain, static Web pages and tapping into bare-bones email clients. Today, it’s all about managed IPTV services and over-the-top video, including waves of subscription-based on-demand offerings and a growing batch of live TV services.

The Internet sure seems to look a lot more like a “channel” now in the sense that it’s become a high-speed conduit for video, and, perhaps in one way of thinking about it, another example of Glenn Jones’s entrepreneurial spirit and vision.

Glenn Jones was remembered in poignant, often humorous anecdotes at a memorial service attended by hundreds of people in Denver on Wednesday (July 29) who came to honor the pioneering cable-television and education entrepreneur who died on July 7 at age 85.

The elegant Ellie Caulkins Opera House was a fitting venue to honor the Jones Intercable founder, who was known for his snappy and formal attire even at a time when casual Friday became an everyday event.

Speakers including former United Cable honcho Fred Vierra and former Group W Cable CEO Daniel Ritchie, as well as Jones’ brother, Neil, and Robinson Dairy co-CEO Dick Robinson. Each shared touching and funny stories about Jones’s varied life, attendees said. Vierra recalled Jones’s early life in the Navy and told funny stories about Jones’s sense of humor. Robinson touched on Jones’s impeccable dressy style. A video montage of tributes was also played during the memorial service, attendees said. 

A cadre of industry veterans including Mediacom Communications chairman and CEO Rocco Commisso, Cablevision Systems founder and chairman Charles Dolan, former American Television & Communications CEO Trygve Myhren, Multichannel News founder Paul Maxwell and former Tele-Communications Inc. COO J.C. Sparkman were among those in attendance.

There was “a lot of laughter and very poignant moments,” said longtime industry friend Sam Klosterman, a business development executive at SNL Kagan, who said the gathering felt a bit like a "chairman's reception" at a cable-industry convention. “Glenn was a man who lived life to the fullest with a drive for business and a kindness felt by all who had encounters with him. “

“Glenn was a true maverick and a man who lived at least five full, and extraordinary lives at once. Any of them would have been impressive in and of themselves. But he did it all in one lifetime,” Lela Cocoros, a long-time cable veteran and current digital media executive, said. “[It was] nice to see so many longtime cable friends and colleagues, though hard to accept the loss of yet another industry visionary.” (RELATED: Remembering Glenn Jones, a life in photos.)

At a gathering after the memorial at the nearby Seawell Grand Ballroom, guests received two editions of Jones's poetry, including this one written in March 2013:

Master Diver's Funeral

When I go down to my grave in the sea,

I'll want "old glory" spread over me.

And I'll want eight sailors in dress blues

With clean white hats and black shined shoes.

And I'll want the crew to stand and look,

While the captain reads from his old black book.

Then the rifles will crack and their smoke will rise,

And they’ll slide me over the side.

Then I'll sink free,

To the depths of the sea,

No bubbles on my last dive.

Jones is survived by his partner of 34 years, Dianne Eddolls; daughters Suzanne Jones and Christine Marocco; son John Paul; three grandsons; his sister Ruth Terrian and brother Neil Jones.

RELATED:Jones Was Cable’s Renaissance Man

I was nervous as hell on the flight from New York to Denver.

It was the spring of 1995, and I was on my way to interview a tough-as-nails former Navy underwater bomb-disposal expert turned cable operator, one of my first page-one assignments on an important new beat as a 29-year-old reporter at The Wall Street Journal.

The more I had heard about this guy, the harder it was to pigeonhole him, and I wanted desperately to impress the editors back in New York.

I was expecting a tough-talking ex-military, bear of a man itching to regale me with war stories or, worse, bloviate about the dominance of his cable company, Jones Intercable, the seventh-largest MSO in the U.S.

The man I met blew away every single expectation I had as I stepped into his cavernous office overlooking the Rockies.

Dapper and polite, Glenn Jones ushered me to a dining table in his office and immediately started quizzing me instead, about life in New York City. This guy wasn’t a “tough guy” at all; if anything, he was downright disarming — and as I would soon learn, exceedingly eccentric. Indeed, he was a wiry-thin walking set of contradictions.

He was a coal-miner's son who worked in the steel mills of Pennsylvania and barely made it to college. He was now a published poet with an office of bookcases groaning with great works of literature. He played bagpipes to call employees to company meetings.

He kept a crackling fire in his office -- even in spring -- because, he said, he’d never truly been warm since his deep-water diving days in the Navy. (Nearsighted, he snuck into the infirmary and memorized the eye-test to become a frogman.)

At one point in the interview, he sat down at a piano and played cocktail-lounge riffs, though he happily conceded he couldn’t read a note of music.

The highlight of my office tour that day was an all-black “war room,” which he personally had designed detail for detail after a scene from the science-fiction novel Dune and where he literally monitored Jones’s operations.

Hanging in nearly every employee cubicle were signs that read: "Attack, Attack, Always Attack!" 

One of Glenn’s quirkiest traits was his utter obsessions with dragons, which caught his attention during his days as a young naval officer in Japan.

Jana Henthorn, a Jones general manager, described for the WSJ story the ceremony where she was awarded the company's highest honor — the Jones International Medallion of the Alliance, emblazoned with a dragon: “He puts a medallion around your neck and he kisses you on both cheeks and he looks you in the eye. Then he says, ‘You are a dragon slayer. The dragons in the caves tremble at your approach.’ It was the high point of my career. The whole time they were playing bagpipes.” 

During our lunch, he laughed often and avoided talk about the Navy because it was “boring.” Instead, he wanted to talk about the things that stoked his bottomless curiosity about the world around him: man’s desire to learn, the lessons of history, battle theory — and the future of cable TV.

He was a Renaissance man, yes, but he was also the definition of a word that is too quickly tossed about these days: a visionary. Few entrepreneurs deserve that title more than Glenn Jones. 

Beyond the Horatio Alger story of his life, and his unlikely ascent to become a Top 10 U.S. cable operator, Glenn Jones actually executed a vision he had to change education in America with his Mind Extension University, which delivered college lectures to 26 million homes. It’s now a concept flourishing with countless colleges and universities, thanks to the Internet.

“I am in the business of extending the human mind,” he told me that day. “There are Leonardo da Vincis and Thomas Edisons out there that need access to education to break free.” 

More than that, to me, he was a friend. Twenty years later, it’s easy to look back and see my life — and my career — is richer having known him, and it pains me greatly to know he’s not here. Over 20 years, we’ve kept in touch; at the INTX show in Chicago a few months ago, I promised to call him this month for another lunch.

Glenn was an original, one of the great, genuine characters of the cable industry in the swashbuckling days of unfettered growth, and depressingly fewer of those mavericks are around than ever before. 

Most of all, I’ll miss the poetry of Glenn’s unlikely life.

One of my favorite poems, quoted in the WSJ page one story, was "Dragon Dreams," which reads, in part: 

“Every day the dragons say 

They're gonna cut me down, 

But every day the sun comes up 

And I am still around. 

The dragons dream 

But so do I, 

And I'm gonna get them 

By and by.”

RELATED:Death of a Dragon Slayer

Poet, technologist, educator, businessman, entrepreneur — Glenn Jones was all of that and more to the people he encountered in the cable business over the past 50 years.

One of the true cable pioneers — he famously borrowed $400 against his Volkswagen to buy his first system in 1967 — Jones died at 85 years old on July 7. He leaves behind his companion of 34 years, Dianne Eddolls; daughters Christine Marocco and Suzanne Jones; son John Paul; grandsons Joseph and Daniel Marocco and David Jones; sister Ruth Terrian; brother Neil Jones; and numerous nieces and nephews.

In an industry full of outsized personalities, Jones stood out in his own way. Introspective and scholarly, he joined the U.S. Navy after graduating from Allegheny College with a degree in economics and served in its underwater bomb-disposal unit. He received a law degree in 1961 from the University of Colorado School of Law, and launched his cable career by representing MSOs in their acquisition efforts.

In 1964, Jones put his law career on hold to run for the U.S. Congress in Colorado’s First Congressional District (Denver). After an unsuccessful run, he decided to renew his focus on the cable television industry.

TOP-10 CABLE OPERATOR

But Jones made his mark in the cable industry, parlaying that $400 investment to help create what would at its peak become one of the 10 largest cable companies in the country with about 1.4 million subscribers. He sold Jones Intercable to Comcast in 1999.

“I affectionately referred to Glenn Jones as the ‘cable poet’ because he was such a unique and multitalented individual,” Mediacom Communications founder, chairman and CEO Rocco Commisso said in a statement. “After 32 incredibly successful years at Jones Intercable, Glenn followed his entrepreneurial instincts and poured his creative talents into a number of other highly successful ventures.”

Jones wrote a lot of poetry — he published several volumes of Briefcase Poetry of Yankee Jones — but that wasn’t his only passion. Over his nearly 50 years in the business, he pioneered forming public limited partnerships as a way to finance cable acquisitions, laid the groundwork for what would become the industry’s most profitable business line — high-speed Internet service — and created the first accredited online university in Jones International University.

“Glenn was truly a Renaissance man,” said friend Decker Anstrom, the former National Cable Television Association president and former president of Landmark Communications. “He had such varied interests. You could sit down with him and one moment he’d be talking about finance, then about poetry or politics. And of course his true passion was education.”

And he wasn’t afraid to take on a fight.

Anstrom cited the significance of Jones’s Alexandria, Va., system, which first showed the power of two-way cable by demonstrating an Internet connection in 1993. At that time, there was a lot of turmoil in the industry as telcos were putting heavy pressure on Congress to allow them into the cable business.

“Glenn’s basic view was, ‘Why should we be afraid of that?’ ”Anstrom said. “We’re more nimble, we will have a better plant and we’ll be able to do things they can’t do, and we have this relationship with customers through our video service.”

It helped that at the time, as Congress was pushing for more competition in the video industry, it also was looking for new phone-industry entrants to balance out the telcos’ dominance of that business.

VITAL DEMONSTRATION

“I think Glenn’s ability to demonstrate hands-on what could happen was very pivotal in changing a lot of people’s minds that cable could be the competitor to wireline telephony,” Anstrom said. In order to do that, Jones and the cable industry convinced regulators that MSOs needed access to investment capital to rapidly upgrade their plant, which led to the reversal of the 1992 Cable Act and to the 1996 Telecom Act.

Jones also recognized early that original content would drive pay TV subscriptions. He had a hand in creating several networks through his Jones Media Networks, including Great American Country, which was sold to Scripps Networks in 2004, and Knowledge TV. His Jones Entertainment Group produced award-winning documentaries and movies such as The Mystery of Genius, The Secret of Roan Inish, The Story Lady, The Whipping Boy and The Little Kidnappers.

“Glenn was a man before his time,” Jones/NCTI CEO Stacey Slaughter said in a statement. “He leaves a tremendous legacy for our Jones companies and for the industries he served.”

A memorial service for Jones is scheduled for July 29 11 a.m. (MT) at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House in the Denver Center for the Performing Arts (1101 13th St.) in Denver. A reception will follow in the Seawell Ballroom.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be sent to: Denver Area Council, Boy Scouts of America, 10455 W. 6th Ave. No. 100, Denver, CO, 80215; or Volunteers of America, Colorado Branch, 2660 Larimer St., Denver, CO, 80205.

Memorial services for Glenn R. Jones, the cable industry and distance learning pioneer who died July 7, is scheduled for Wednesday, July 29 at 11 a.m. Mountain Time, at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House in the Denver Center for the Performing Arts (1101 13th St.) in Denver. A reception will follow in the Seawell Ballroom, it was announced.

Jones, who was 85,  is survived by his love of 34 years, Dianne Eddolls; daughters Christine Marocco and Suzanne Jones; son John Paul; grandsons Joseph and Daniel Marocco and David Jones; sister Ruth Terrian; brother Neil Jones and numerous nieces and nephews.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be sent to: Denver Area Council, Boy Scouts of America, 10455 W. 6th Ave. #100, Denver, CO 80215; or Volunteers of America, Colorado Branch, 2660 Larimer St., Denver, CO  80205.

Jones/NCTI, the Denver-based provider of training for cable, broadband techs and customer service reps, has struck a partnership with CableLabs that will result in new DOCSIS 3.1 training and course content for the emerging multi-gigabit platform for HFC networks. 

Under the deal, CableLabs, which published the original D3.1 specs in October 2014 ahead of certification testing that is underway now and initial deployments expected to begin later this year, will provide Jones/NCTI with DOCSIS 3.1 subject matter expertise on the new courses.  Jones/NCTI said it is also integrating CableLabs DOCSIS 3.1 training material into an updated version of the Broadband Digital Installer course for release later this month. 

Jones/NCTI said it will develop content for three new DOCSIS 3.1 courses designed for technicians and other frontline employees. The new courses will roll out starting in the late part of the second quarter of 2015 or by early Q3 2015, following CableLabs review.

Training and coursework options continue to emerge as the cable industry prepares for the deployment phase of DOCSIS 3.1. As part of its work with CableLabs, the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) has developed DOCSIS 3.1 coursework and training materials for  mid- to senior-level data and headend techs. That four-module course is being offering as a one-day on-site course, and as a Web-based self-paced course.

DOCSIS 3.1, which will make cable spectrum more efficient via the use of blocks of OFDM subcarriers in tandem with a new Low Density Parity Check forward error correction (FEC) scheme, is targeting max capacities of 10 Gbps down and at least 1 Gbps upstream.

"From the Internet of Things to the Connected Home, DOCSIS 3.1 technology will change the way consumers and businesses interact today. This innovative agreement with CableLabs will help advance the industry and ensure that frontline teams stay ahead of fast-changing technology,” Stacey Slaughter, Jones/NCTI CEO, said in a statement.

"With multi-Gigabit services soon becoming a reality for broadband customers, it is imperative that frontline employees are educated on the new generation of capabilities that will be available to consumers and businesses. We are pleased that Jones/NCTI will deliver the necessary training materials to prepare field employees for the deployment of DOCSIS 3.1 solutions,” added Steve Higgins, director of network technologies, CableLabs, added. 

Jones International University, the Colorado-based distance education school founded by cable pioneer Glenn R. Jones in 1993, will be shutting down due to a sharp decline in enrollments, according to theDenver Business Journal.

The publication said JIU’s decision follows a 55% drop in enrollments between 2011 and 2014, leaving it with about 2,000 students.

The decision will not impact the operations of Jones/NCTI, a provider of workforce education, career planning and performance products for the cable/broadband industry that is headquartered at the Jones building in Centennial, Colo. (pictured). “Jones/NCTI will continue to provide employee training, consulting services, and online educational services for the cable/telecommunications industry,” a spokeswoman said via email.

In a message on its Web site, JIU said currently enrolled students have been alerted to the impending closure and its timeline, along with details about how they can transfer their studies to Trident University International as part of a formal agreement. Trident, founded in 1998, is an online university based in Cypress, Calif.

“Jones International University is committed to a smooth and orderly transition and providing you clear direction and information during this time,” JIU added.

TheDenver Business Journalsaid JIU expects to complete its wind-down over the next 12 to 15 months, noting that students with less than a year left in their studies will be able to complete their courses and graduate from JIU.

JIU, once billed as “The University of the Web,” began to offer classes in the spring of 1995. JIU was the first online university to receive accreditation, obtaining that distinction in 1999 from the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of  Colleges and Schools. JIU awarded its first graduate degree in 1997.  

Glenn Jones, who sold Jones Intercable, once a top-10 cable operator, to Comcast in April 1999, has been a leading proponent of distance learning, going back to Mind Extension University (ME/U)*, an education-focused cable channel that launched in 1987 and was sold to Discovery in 1999, when the Jones-run programmer was known as Knowledge TV. Jones has also authored books about his vision for distance learning and online education, including Make All America A School and Cyberschools: An Education Renaissance.

Jones’s legacy and passion for distance learning will live on at Trident.

"The decision to close JIU was particularly difficult for our founder, Glenn R. Jones, who poured his energy and personal financial resources into making JIU the first regionally accredited fully online university,” Bryan Wallace, JIU’s COO, said in a statement to the DBJ.  “In recognition of Mr. Jones’s military service, entrepreneurial spirit and extensive contributions to the fields of business and education, TUI is renaming its College of Business Administration The Glenn R. Jones College of Business Administration."

*The author of this article, Multichannel News technology editor Jeff Baumgartner, was an employee of Jones Education Networks and ME/U from 1994 to 1998, and took several courses from JIU.