At sunrise Sunday, the sun set on the iconic building that had served as the headquarters of Jones International and Jones Intercable, the MSO founded by Glenn R. Jones, the cable pioneer and entrepreneur, who died on July 7, 2015, at age 85.

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The building, located just south of Denver along 1-25 at 9697 East Mineral Ave. in Englewood, was completed in 1984 and served as the corporate headquarters of Jones Intercable, a major U.S. MSO that was sold to Comcast in April 1999. It also was home to several other Jones-run businesses through the years, including education network Mind Extension University (ME/U) (later renamed Knowledge TV), Jones Cyber Solutions, Jones International University (a distance education school founded by Jones in 1993 and shut down in April 2015), and Jones/NCTI, a cable training company that was acquired by Stacey Slaughter in late 2015 and rebranded as NCTI in June 2016. The building came down as The Opus Group prepares to start the next phase of a new mixed-use, master-planned project called The Jones District.  

South Metro Fire Rescue conducted the implosion early Sunday morning, according to 9News/KUSA-TV, which has also posted a video of the demolition.

South Metro Fire Rescue also tweeted videos of the demolition, including this alternate view: 

Another impressive view of the Jones implosion from 06:45 a.m. today. pic.twitter.com/2SocqkT8V6

— SouthMetroFireRescue (@SouthMetroPIO) October 8, 2017

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A group of former Jones “associates” (Glenn Jones preferred that term over “employees”) gathered Saturday (October 7) afternoon to bid good-bye to the building, reminisce, and to raise a toast to the late cable executive and pioneer, who was also referred to as the “The Poet of Technology,” as he composed several volumes of poetry under the pen name of Yankee Jones, and wrote numerous books about his visions, including Cyberschools: An Education Renaissance, Free Market Fusion, and Make All America a School, among others.

RELATED: Memorial Sends Glenn Jones Off In Style

Another, smaller group gathered Sunday (October 8) morning, soon after the building was reduced to rubble.

Jim Honiotes, a former Jones associate who is now executive director of Prosonta Associates, has been using Facebook to post information about the demolition and to offer a place on social media for others to contribute their remembrances.

RELATED: Remembering Glenn Jones, A Life in Photos

“There were a few who enjoyed the building's very first (leaky) days in July 1985 and many who came later or stayed longer,” Honiotes wrote. “But don't think for a minute that this was ‘just a building’ or a place to work. It was a feeling of belonging, of pride in your work, in enjoying your co-workers, giving your best and being appreciated. This futuristic space-ship-inspired building launched many successful careers and taught thousands of people that being FOR something would always be better than being AGAINST something.”

Honiotes also confirmed that a former Jones associate is now in possession of the "JONES" letters that comprised a sign that was emblazoned on the northeast corner of the building, facing the highway.

Despite the razing of the building, the Jones name will live on in the area. The Jones District, located west of I-25, is a multi-use, master planned development by Opus Development Company, and named for Glenn Jones.

Opus has already started a 306-unit apartment building to be called “The Glenn at The Jones District,” with completion slated for February 2018. There’s also a proposal for an eight-story mixed use project that will consist of two office buildings as well as a mix of “street-oriented retail” to be located adjacent to the District’s central park.

The Jones organization sold the remainder of The Jones District on June 17 to Opus, according to an official, who added that there is no immediate plan for the land that contained the original Jones HQ building, but that conversations are underway.

[Editor's Note: The author of this article was an employee of Jones Education Networks and ME/U from 1994 to 1998.]

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.

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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.

Wayne Davis, a 37-year cable engineering vet who has been with Charter Communications for the past four years, will retire on May 1.

Davis, who served as Charter’s CTO during an earlier part of his career, rejoined the MSO as vice president of field operations in 2011, where the long-time Colorado resident continued to be based in the Denver area. Charter confirmed that Davis is retiring, but has not said who will take his role.

“Since returning to Charter as VP of Field Operations in 2011, Wayne has contributed in large measure to the company’s turnaround and subsequent return to growth – always serving with intelligence, distinction and integrity,” Tom Adams, EVP of field operators at Charter, said in a statement. “Without question, Wayne will be missed throughout the company as both a valued colleague and friend. But Charter will continue to benefit from his contributions to our business for many years to come.”     

Davis previously joined Charter in 2001 as vice president of engineering for its Western division, eventually rising to CTO and EVP of engineering and technical operations, before leaving in 2006. During this part of his career, Charter was among the MSOs that tested "Passage," a technology developed by Sony that aimed to drive a wedge into the Motorola/Cisco set-top duopoly, and was also an early adopter of digital simulcast, which paved the way for today's all-digital cable platform. 

In 2007, Davis was appointed CEO of Vyyo (later renamed Javelin Innovations), a company that specialized in bandwidth-expanding technologies that could raise an MSO’s usable spectrum into the neighborhood of 3GHz (Cox Communications and StarHub of Singapore were among Vyyo's known customers). In 2010, Javelin, still under Davis, began to offer a line of 1.8GHz modules that took aim at a cable tap market dominated at the time by Motorola, Arris, and Cisco Systems 

Prior to his original stint at Charter, Davis was with Comcast briefly following its acquisition of Colorado-based Jones Intercable, where Davis spent 15 years in a variety of engineering roles, including head of engineering and technology.