The 2017 Tech Roundtable Panelists
Kevin Hart, executive vice president and chief product and technology officer, Cox Communications
Dan Hennessy, chief architecture architect, Liberty Global
Jay Rolls, chief technology officer and senior vice president, Charter Communications
JR Walden, senior vice president of technology and CTO, Mediacom Communications
Tony Werner, president of technology and product, Comcast Cable
Read More From the 2017 Tech Roundtable Agenda
Capacity|Mobile & Wireless|The Home of the Future

MCN:What matters beyond speed and throughput/range and reach for some of the services headed our way -- augmented reality, augmented discovery, VR, aging in place, automation, healthcare? Pick your favorite.
Jay Rolls: What matters is network latency, and overall visibility. Things like AR and health care and adjacent verticals -- it’s all about interactivity, and the rapid translation of photons to electrons.

Technologies like 802.11ax will help with the latency quest, which will be never-ending. And real-time, local visibility into how the network is running will help us to deliver a consistently high quality of experience, across devices.

Kevin Hart: We're very excited about home healthcare...around enabling the aging population. Just based on demographics, there's a huge need and a huge opportunity, but within the network some of the artificial intelligence and some of the connectivity speeds but also some of the privacy components around HIPAA-compliant information ...are also important.

The infrastructure we're putting into place, from a speed [perspective] is great, but privacy and security and latency, some of the real-time responses, I think will become even more important as you see more [need] for remote healthcare monitoring and more healthcare-centric solutions over time.

Dan Hennessy: Other network conditions start to come in to play here, like latency, jitter, and packet loss.
We have equipment distributed across our footprint and in our network that allows us to closely monitor these parameters – to ensure that we know if it changes, why it changed, and what it means to the customer. This will become increasingly important. New standards, such as DOCSIS 3.1, also have targeted changes to improve the quality of service.

Tech Roundtable 2016 | Cable Tech at a Crossroads

For sure, what we expect, and as discussed in context of IoT, is a continued growth in devices. Giving our customers visibility and control is key. Making sure their devices get the right priority, and remain secure, powered, live and connected on the network -- as more and more devices connect and need proper “care and feeding” -- becomes more critical to day-to-day life.

MCN: How has your reliance on the public cloud evolved over the last couple of years? Are you using more public or private cloud, and why does that matter?
KH: It's really a hybrid of all of the above, based on the use case. We're doing a lot of things internally and some our own cloud capabilities with infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service and some of the things we're doing around virtualization. We also use third-party clouds where it makes sense, based on their skillsets and capability. And from a managed service perspective, we have some product and service offerings leveraging cloud-based components. But now that you've adopted this hybrid cloud environment, it's now about how do you optimize it for performance and cost and security -- that's probably the next frontier.

JR: We rely on both -- private and public. Both are good at different things, and the crux of it is taking advantage of what they’re good at. For instance, the public cloud is good for things that need velocity -- prototyping, instantaneous scaling. The private cloud is more for things that are in production, which need to be highly secure. A good example is cloud DVR. Cloud DVR is obviously going to need a lot of cloud infrastructure, but it’s also well understood, with well-defined metrics. Because you know how it’s going to perform, it’s just going to be more cost effective to do on a private cloud.

MCN: What is the right balance of engineering talent you need these days, and how do you attract it?
Tony Werner: We do a lot of recruiting, especially when we’re speaking at non-traditional industry events. The right balance is a tricky task - we still need RF engineers, because we still operate a lot of RF. We still need infrastructure experts, because we operate a significant infrastructure. In general, though, it’s software, systems, and architectural engineering talent that we seek. We’ve made significant strides in how we attract that talent, primarily by making sure that Comcast is a great environment for developers and innovators to come work, but we can always do more.

JR Walden: We're finding less need for HFC talent every day, in part because you still have a lot in the organization, so demands are kind of in the decline. Five to ten years ago, it was hard finding network skills. The battle for high-speed data is over. Cable has won. And most people in professional areas see that, so people with networking skills who have interest in being in the internet business are finding us a lot more than ever before.

Tech Roundtable 2015 | Revving Up to ‘Web Speed’

The area of challenge is on the software side. That has been tougher. I guess the good news is that being near New York doesn’t make for the most inexpensive job market, but people with those skills in New York are definitely not working for .com companies. At least I'm not competing for that talent. We've been plucking millennials straight out of college and teaching them ourselves and hoping that they don't leave too quickly. But we seem to be doing okay keeping the folks we have sort of home-grown.

KH: Investing in our people and our talent is a top priority at Cox in both product and technology and training and skillsets. [In early October], my team worked on an operating model of the future for the team, but software-enabled everything is critical, virtualization is critical, cybersecurity skills are paramount.

We bring in talent through recruiting and through our third-party vendors and we also have a very robust co-op and intern programs, and interns from leading schools like George Tech right here in Atlanta. Tulsa is one of our markets, and they have one of the top cybersecurity schools in the country. We're bringing in interns and co-ops and recruits from these feeder schools and also brining in talent with a lot of experience, as well, from some of these new trending areas, like mobility, IP, cybersecurity, etc.

DH: Our move away from closed vendor ecosystems to open, embedded software development -- either directly ourselves or with partners – means we must ensure that we have the right talent onboard. It’s these engineers that drive our business forward.

Over the last 12 months we have brought our technology group together across Europe, which gives a truly global opportunity for our engineers and developers to build products and services -- all the way from the UK, Germany and Switzerland, through to Eastern Europe, and across to Latin American and the Caribbean. Whether it’s fixed or mobile access, Internet, TV and video, or a full suite of B2B services. That’s a pretty rare opportunity.

JR: The right balance is the technologist who has a degree of nimbleness between hardware and software, and tends to think about things from a systems perspective. We’ve been surprised to see talent coming to our Denver engineering groups from Silicon Valley. The recurring themes appear to be both quality of life, and cost of living. I think you’ll see more and more evidence that shows a talent shift in our collective direction, and that’s really gratifying.

The 2017 Tech Roundtable Panelists
Kevin Hart, executive vice president and chief product and technology officer, Cox Communications
Dan Hennessy, chief architecture architect, Liberty Global
Jay Rolls, chief technology officer and senior vice president, Charter Communications
JR Walden, senior vice president of technology and CTO, Mediacom Communications
Tony Werner, president of technology and product, Comcast Cable

Read More From the 2017 Tech Roundtable Agenda
Capacity|Mobile & Wireless| Beyond Speeds and Feeds and Attracting Talent


MCN: To what extent are you gearing up to automate people’s homes to make them more useful?
Dan Hennessy: Our automation focus is very much linked to our core products and services, and where we can bring clear value right now: Voice search and control of our video services. Ensuring that all our platforms work in harmony. Installing new hardware in the home, like WiFi APs, such that it happens seamlessly. Giving customers a way to easily onboard third party IoT devices in their home.

What’s as important here is the business logic we’re building in our back office for “connectivity services.” It’s similar to what we’ve done for our video products and services, in terms of having a flexible, microservices-based back end that is open to third party integration.

JR Walden: We're an Icontrol affiliate [Comcast and Alarm.com bought pieces of Icontrol earlier this year]. It hasn’t been a huge business for us. I think we have concerns that trying to compete with CE companies in that space...is going to be tough for Icontrol, let alone Mediacom.

We want to be a service provider. We think we're good at being a service provider, so what’s the service here? We imagine providing some services to help facilitate and manage the customer's smart home and IoT device future. I don't know if we'll manage the service as a whole...but we think there's a place to play there. Like maybe you could use your Amazon Echo to do things on your TiVo set-top box...rather than using the remote or using a voice remote.

Rather than trying to be the guy who does everything, let's work with what people want, even if Google Home is the device or it's an Amazon device. We’re going to come out with a voice remote, too, that works with Nuance [Communications].

Kevin Hart: We're making great advances in our connected home and smart home platforms. We’re leveraging the existing platform, but we've also got other future-state possibilities, and coupling the Cox HomeLife platform offering with our Panoramic WiFi [product]. We've been going market to market and connecting a home and making it a true smart home with over 50 or so connected devices in the home, and virtual reality and home care demos, robotic dogs, you name it. We're also doing a little bit some remote healthcare monitoring. There's a lot of possibilities here and I think we're just scratching the surface of the industry.

Tony Werner: With the combination of xFi and Xfinity Home we think we’re in an ideal position to give our customers a simple one-stop solution for controlling their connected homes. With xFi, we take the mystery and guesswork out of our customers’ home WiFi networks, providing a real-time dashboard of what devices are on the network and how they are performing. With Xfinity Home, we’ve combined a powerful home security solution, with an increasingly integrated IoT hub. Through our “Works With Xfinity” program, our customers can control their Nest thermostats, August locks, Chamberlin garage door openers, and many other popular IoT devices all from their Xfinity Home app. We are continuously bringing more partners onto the platform. On the backend, we’re leveraging machine learning and our own homegrown rules engine to give our customers more pinpoint control over how their connected homes work.

MCN: In what ways is AI and machine learning guiding your technology strategy?
DH: AI and ML already exist in our businesses in a number of different areas -- both embedded in our products and services, and also as part of a number of new avenues we’re investigating. Not just customer facing, but for operational and engineering analytics use cases, too.

We’re using machine learning, for instance, to help us fine tune our understanding of how WiFi performs in our customer’s homes. RF modeling, and knowing those behaviors, can get us so far. Adding in telemetry from our devices in the field, and ML in the backend infrastructure, takes our insights to the next level.

Additionally, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the associated AI is already deployed as part of our voice search and personalization services. We see much more applicability here in the front lines of our business, where interactions across 24 million customers can be tailored much more accurately.

The key with AI and ML is telemetry and data management. To leverage these techniques, we need to be able to collect and analyze data. From that, we can affect changes back into our services and infrastructure -- whether this is across the network, our service platforms, or our care and operational support systems.

A big step in the right direction is to understand the art of the possible. We’re starting to innovate with partners, internally. We’ve started with multiple trials, and some first deployments as well.

Jay Rolls: Both AI and ML will play an increasing role across our technology stacks, from network management to troubleshooting to connecting customers with the content they want. I think as our networks become denser and more complex, adding more intelligence will help us mine data that matters to the overall success of the businesses.

MCN: What does the Internet of Things mean to your company?
KH: From a product standpoint, some of the analytics that are built into the products, whether they’re visual analytics or voice analytics are making the products more intelligent and more personal. The voice remote stuff is cool on the front end, but having contacts and predicting your next couple moves in the connected home are a big part of what you'll see more and more of on the product roadmap.

From a technology operational network perspective, there's things we are doing with software-defined networking and some of the intelligence we’re building in through software and quality of service and latency. And from an operational perspective, doing more and more with some of the artificial intelligence around quality of service, call-in rates and truck roll reduction and customer experience. It's early days, but we've seen some very promising results.

JR: Whether it’s ensuring security and privacy, or connecting customers to specific capabilities, like health monitoring and wellness -- the IoT scene, which our customers are bringing onto our networks by the handfuls, enables us to take a customer-centric approach. The key to the IoT and our industry is that it’s based on the common denominator of connectivity.

TW: We are committed to AI and machine learning, because we’ve seen firsthand how those technologies can make our products better and improve the customer experience. We use AI and Machine Learning algorithms today to advance and refine our Natural Language Processing platform, detect and fix incidents in our network, and help our customers find content they love. We’ve got a first-rate team of PhDs working on these technologies day and night, and customers are already seeing that reflected in the products they use every day.

DH: Opportunity, more than anything. We’re seeing an explosion in connected devices, for sure, and the need for seamless onboarding, increased visibility, control, configuration and management. This is a key consideration as we think about how we develop our connectivity products and services.

Our customers rely on us to ensure their home network is secure, effective, and above all, is just there. Available. The key will be which devices and services our customers bring into their homes. The IoT market remains fragmented, from a service and technology standards point of view (Sigfox, LoRa, NB-IoT etc.) We’re experimenting with most of these.

We also see many new partnership possibilities opening up, with both established and new players. The IoT landscape brings in very diverse industries -- from lighting, to kitchen goods, home security and other utilities. How these will play out, and where the value and roles lie, is still a work in progress.

Beyond residential, we’re seeing plenty of interest in the B2B segment. We have a number of trials with home builders and commercial real estate firms, where mutual opportunities exist. Whether it’s environmental sensors and control, WiFi coverage and management, broader sensor and device onboarding, or management.

MCN: What matters when the task is securing the physical home, as well as the digital stuff in it?
TW: One of our over-arching product goals is to provide equipment and services that behave like a courteous guest in the home. Always there, always on, always connected, and pleasing to the eye, but also always on the lookout. Our Xfinity Home product started out as a physical home security offering, and quickly expanded into automation and smart home. A big part of that overall philosophy is to safeguard for both physical belongings, and digital identities.

JR: It’s a one-word answer: Trust. We’re in a unique position, because we are poised to protect between the physical, and the digital. As IP-connected devices proliferate, in the home and the business, we are becoming the trusted entity. Both for reliable service, as well as stewards of security.

DH: Trust is key here, of course – with an operational model that truly supports the offering. In both residential and B2B markets, local regulation and standards compliance will influence our interest and ability to enter this market. We also don’t see (for now) the same degree of demand as we see in other markets (notably North America) for these services.

The focus of the cable industry used to be a lot simpler. Its lens was generally trained on how to deliver and wield a quality package of pay TV, broadband and voice service that could be used to thwart competition from the telcos and satellite-TV providers.

These days, those service and tech strategies also place a heavy emphasis on wireless (WiFi, in and out of the home, and mobile) and over-the-top video (as an emerging competitor and complementary offering). To support current services and those that are out on the horizon, cable operators are also moving ahead with strategies and architectures that help them use their existing bandwidth more efficiently, or by adding capacity through projects and initiatives such as DOCSIS 3.1 and Full Duplex DOCSIS.

To get a fix on these areas of importance ahead of this month’s SCTE-ISBE Cable-Tec Expo in Denver (Oct. 17-20), Multichannel News caught up with a handful of top technology and engineering executives.

Taking part in this year’s virtual tech roundtable — an aggregation of separate interviews with MCN technology editor Jeff Baumgartner and columnist Leslie Ellis of Ellis Edits — were:
Kevin Hart, executive vice president and chief product and technology officer, Cox Communications;
Dan Hennessy, chief architecture architect, Liberty Global;
Jay Rolls, chief technology officer and senior vice president, Charter Communications;
JR Walden, senior vice president of technology and CTO, Mediacom Communications; and
Tony Werner, president of technology and product, Comcast Cable.

The 2017 Agenda
Capacity|Mobile & Wireless|The Home of the Future| Beyond Speeds and Feeds and Attracting Talent

The 2017 Tech Roundtable Panelists
Kevin Hart, executive vice president and chief product and technology officer, Cox Communications
Dan Hennessy, chief architecture architect, Liberty Global
Jay Rolls, chief technology officer and senior vice president, Charter Communications
JR Walden, senior vice president of technology and CTO, Mediacom Communications
Tony Werner, president of technology and product, Comcast Cable
Read More From the 2017 Tech Roundtable Agenda
Mobile & Wireless|The Home of the Future| Beyond Speeds and Feeds and Attracting Talent

MCN: What are your priorities, as it relates to network capacity?
Jay Rolls: Our priority is to constantly balance capacity against demand. It’s a never-ending quest. We watch it very closely, and we’re very pragmatic about it -- the volume of tools, metrics and ways to see what’s really happening, and invest accordingly, is really deepening in ways that matter.

Tony Werner: We’ve been on a pretty steady path of doubling our network capacity every 18-24 months for several years, and I don’t see anything that makes me think that will change. We’re making better and faster products for our customers who expect and deserve world-class online experiences, and the network has to deliver on that promise. The key from my perspective is staying ahead of that curve in a way that’s smart and future-proof. We’ve been strategically extending fiber further into our network to meet customer demand, and that effort, combined with our commitment to deploying DOCSIS 3.1 has given us a network that’s powerful, flexible, and ready for what’s next.

JR Walden: We have completed the removal of all the analog channels. That was the big step one. Step two was to start transitioning high-speed data over to DOCSIS 3.1, so we're not adding any more 3.0 channels, and reuse spectrum for 3.1, which is a bit more efficient. The whole company is 3.1, all of the modems we're buying since June have been 3.1, so we've begun that next transition. 

We're in the process of migrating to MPEG-4, mostly the HDs. That's following along with some of our set-top refresh -- getting some of the old MPEG-2-only capable boxes out of the network and we can transition more of the channels to MPEG-4. 

Right on the heels of that, we're going to start moving some channels, the lower-viewed channels and some premiums, over to IP. We're also reducing node sizes. We average about 285 homes to 290 homes per node as an average. 

Kevin Hart: Ultimately, our goal is to continue to provide a great customer experience with a competitive broadband product and service. To do that, we are continuing to keep pace with downstream and upstream data rates, which is key to being competitive with our speed offerings, and quality of service. Reducing latency is also a top priority.

We’re investing in the network and in those growth rates, in terms of downstream and upstream speeds. Those are key drivers. Ultimately, providing that in-home or on-premises (business) experience, with our WiFi products — is equally important.

Tech Roundtable 2016 | Cable Tech at a Crossroads

Dan Hennessy: We see demand increasing by up to 45% across our markets and in recent years, we responded with a wide deployment of CCAP [converged cable access platform] equipment throughout our footprint. That investment, along with ongoing node size optimization, enabled us to increase capacity at a much faster rate. As a result, 70 – 80% of our plant will be DOCSIS 3.1 ready by the end of next year, giving us a path to even greater capacity expansion allowing us to continue to increase the available capacity across our access network, upstream and downstream 

MCN: What is your strategy with regard to fiber?
TW: Suffice it to say that fiber plays a key role on our network architecture. Our network today contains more than 150,000 route miles of fiber, and to meet customer demand, we extend fiber further into the neighborhoods we serve each year. When it comes to delivering gigabit speeds, our focus is obviously on DOCSIS 3.1, and our new xFi Advanced Gateway, which will bring Gig availability to more people, in more markets than ever before. But part of the reason we’re able to deliver that capacity is because we’ve systematically enhanced our network with fiber.

I feel pretty strongly that the best path ahead is to leverage the existing coaxial network and DOCSIS resources to the fullest, then inch towards FTTH, over time. Why? Because we can. We don’t have to build an entire network just to turn up one customer.

KH: Once you leverage the existing coax that we have, by taking fiber deep toward an N+0 architecture, we're future-proofing our investment , we're positioning ourselves to leverage DOCSIS 3.1, and also position ourselves for Full Duplex, because symmetrical speeds will be important. 

And we're also thinking about the fiber investment and fiber deep as it relates to our wireless strategy, enabling some of our customer with a small cell strategy but also positioning ourselves to take advantage of that in the future as well as thinking about fiber deep to benefit both residential and our commercial customers simultaneously. 

We've got a ten-year network 2.0 network transformation plan, and fiber deep, DOCSIS 3.1 and Full Duplex are at the core of what's driving the investment. 

DH: We’re aggressively future-proofing our network. Over 80% of our new build program is based on a combination of either fiber-deep, retaining the HFC final drop, or fiber-to-the-home.

The U.K. is a good example -- that’s where our “Project Lightning” network expansion initiative is happening (announced in early 2015). Cable network build had been very limited in parts of the U.K. since the ‘80s, and until a few years ago and is now benefiting from this fiber strategy.

JW: [Fiber deep] is a bit further out, at least as a large-scale type of project. I think fiber deep for MDUs, high-density areas and some planned communities, higher end communities doing deeper fiber or fiber-to-the-home [is happening]. But as a wholesale [change] and going to node+0 kind of architecture, I don't see that in the next two years. 

Tech Roundtable 2015 | Revving Up to ‘Web Speed’

JR: Fiber-deep is part of the overall capacity conversation. We’re constantly analyzing and monitoring our infrastructure, and matching those results against the technologies we have in our portfolio -- whether that’s DOCSIS 3.1, or taking fiber deeper, or Full Duplex DOCSIS. It’s a rational approach, where we’re trying to balance the needs, the available technologies, and the costs. DOCSIS 3.1 has some pretty remarkable capabilities, but it’s not necessarily a hard-and-fast reason to not take fiber deeper, for instance. Different situations drive different capacity decisions. There’s nothing universal about it -- you have to take it on a market-by-market basis.

MCN: To what extent will you use bridging techniques, like remote PHY & DOCSIS 3.1?
DH: We’re already trialing and testing both Remote PHY and DOCSIS 3.1 across our footprint. Our plan of record is to exploit virtualized and distributed access architectures.

Our strategy is fully focused on leveraging 3.1 and cost to upgrade is less than 20 Euro per home passed, so a very efficient way of getting to speeds of 1 Gbps-plus.

KH: We're making tremendous progress in calendar year 2017 on our DOCSIS 3.1 CCAP deployment. We started in earnest early in the year and by the end of this year, we'll have over one-third of our footprint 3.1-enabled with north of 90% of our footprint enabled with 3.1 by the end of 2018 and early 2019. We're definitely going to be leveraging a remote PHY architecture and some of the early stage testing around remote PHY currently. 

JR: They both play a role. Just like DOCSIS 3.0 and PON played a role in the evolution of the network over the past five years, DOCSIS 3.1 and remote PHY are going to play a major role in the coming years. Everyone will be using them, us included. Like everything else, it’s a matter of matching the right tool to the right task.

TW: I could tell you how committed we are to DOCSIS 3.1, but it may be easier just to lay out our progress to date. Since December 2015, when we provisioned the world’s first DOCSIS 3.1 modem on a customer-facing network, we have been aggressively expanding our D3.1-powered gigabit offering. Today, we have deployed D3.1 in 23 states and dozens of markets, with more coming online all the time. What I love about this technology is that it is a cost-effective way to make gigabit speeds a reality for a far broader cross-section of Americans, and not just to those lucky few who live in a few select neighborhoods. As for remote PHY and DAA [Distributed Access Architecture], both technologies are advancing at a breakneck clip, and I think you’ll hear more from us about them soon. 

MCN: What are the consumer factors pushing you toward the desire to provide symmetrical bandwidth, and eventually take advantage of technologies like Full Duplex DOCSIS (FDX)?
JR: The world of applications and services continues to evolve, obviously, but so far we’ve been able to meet those needs with an asymmetrical topology. That said, things like real-time gaming, augmented and virtual reality, and the Internet of Things -- some of those will likely drive more symmetry in the network. It remains to be seen. Whether it goes completely crazy, or just nudges the demand on the network, it’s good to have techniques like FDX on the drawing board.

KH: It’s a little but further out on the horizon. The upstream growth rate is ticking up a couple of notches, but not to the tune that we would need significant additional capacity and/or a complementary need for symmetrical bandwidth. We're still testing that, but the experiences, the gaming, the latency and interactive [applications] and additionally connected everything, I think, will be drivers of higher need for improved symmetrical speeds. But at this stage, the symmetrical is a nice-to-have for residential and definitely will be a good option for our commercial customers. 

DH: Presently, both our products and the consumption of those products are highly asymmetric. While we see some increase in upstream demand from cloud-based services, we don’t see the asymmetry changing any time soon.

Because of that, we are actively engaged with CableLabs and industry partners on the development of Full Duplex. We see it as part of our future access toolkit.

The 2017 Tech Roundtable Panelists
Kevin Hart, executive vice president and chief product and technology officer, Cox Communications
Dan Hennessy, chief architecture architect, Liberty Global
Jay Rolls, chief technology officer and senior vice president, Charter Communications
JR Walden, senior vice president of technology and CTO, Mediacom Communications
Tony Werner, president of technology and product, Comcast Cable
Read More From the 2017 Tech Roundtable Agenda
Capacity|The Home of the Future|Beyond Speeds and Feeds and Attracting Talent

MCN: What are your wireless priorities?
Dan Hennessy: We believe that connectivity to the home, around the home, and on the go needs to be a high performance, reliable and seamless experience.  As such, we are focused on three areas.

For fixed broadband connectivity services in the home, we want to ensure that our customers are able to benefit from the power of our network -- both to and around the home. That’s regardless of where they live, what their home is like (how big and what it’s made of), or how many devices they want to connect to their in home WiFi. This is where a significant amount of engineering and innovation effort is spent.

From a mobile services perspective, it’s about making sure our customers get the best quad-play deal and experience out there. To do that, we will build on our MVNO capabilities across our markets. Where needed, we want to leverage VoWiFi technologies, to solve for in-home/business coverage issues. As well, we want to ensure that our customers are able to leverage our WiFi access points--roughly 10 million, across Europe. The goal is to bring the fixed and mobile connectivity experience together, seamlessly. To give our customers the best of both.

The third areas is specific to where we have a full MNO footprint, such as in Belgium. Telenet’s acquisition of the mobile operator, BASE, presented an opportunity to upgrade and deliver a world-class radio access network -- alongside the power of a cable access network.

Tech Roundtable 2016 | Cable Tech at a Crossroads

Jay Rolls: First is the launch of WiFi-first MVNO service with Verizon next year, which will serve us well for our short- and medium-term wireless goals.

Second is optimizing the WiFi experience for our residential and business customers. So many people equate “the internet” to “the WiFi signal”! That’s why it’s important that we continue to improve everyone’s WiFi.

Beyond that, we’re conducting both lab and field trials of CBRS (Citizens Broadband Radio Service), in the unlicensed 3.5 GHz spectrum, as well as 5G millimeter wave technologies for fixed use cases, like backhaul.

Kevin Hart: The in-home experience, the on-premises experience and the experience within common spaces in MDUs -- about a third of our residential footprint is multi-dwelling units, so having a having a best-in-class WiFi experience there is key. We've also done a ton with convention centers with hospitality networks and hotels. We made an investment in a company [Blueprint RF, acquired by Cox over the summer] that's going to be bring best in class WiFi for commercial businesses. 

We’ve done some 5G trials, in conjunction with CableLabs. From a technical standpoint, we’ve been one of the leaders in small cell deployments, because of what we’ve been doing with some of our key partners and customers. The 5G trial was a fixed point to point [test]...just to prove out some of the technology and the performance.

JR Walden: We've been focused on in-home WiFi for many years. Maybe 60% of our customers pay us for a managed home WiFi solution. About 90% of our new customers do take that product. We have also been rolling out community WiFi, or metro WiFi...in a number of our communities, but not as aggressively as some of the big guys as we tend to have more low-density markets. I’m not necessarily convinced there are any business models around that. The theory around that is it's a customer affinity [strategy]. But it's not super-expensive to do, so you don't have to gamble too much on that. 

In regards to getting into more of a mobile play, we certainly haven't announced any plans. We've certainly been looking at what options might be and things like 5G and CBRS or other kind of solutions might impact us, both as a B2B or wholesale kind of enabler, like we were with cell tower backhaul, but also potentially getting into the retail side. 

That's one of those areas we'd rather be a fast-follower, frankly, so I’ll root for Comcast or Charter or somebody to blaze a successful trail, and then maybe we'll be prepared to invest in that. 

MCN: What are you doing to make WiFi better or best in class?
Tony Werner: We’re committed to offering a fantastic Wi-Fi experience to our customers, and from our perspective, that means providing a combination of speed, coverage and control. When it comes to speed, our xFi Advanced Gateway is not just the fastest gateway we’ve ever built, we believe it is the best device available today anywhere in the world.

On coverage, we want our customers to have amazing online experiences wherever they go, in or out of the home. On the go, that means continuing to expand our network of more than 18 million Wi-Fi hot spots, and at home, it’s a combination of our world-class gateway, and our forthcoming pods, which will give customers who want it a powerful Wi-Fi mesh network that can blanket any size home with great Wi-Fi. Finally, on control, we really believe xFi is a game changer. We launched it in May to more than 10 million devices, and the response we’ve seen has been tremendous, both in terms of adoption, and customer satisfaction. Today with xFi, our customers can pause WiFi to their kids’ devices for bedtime or dinner (our most popular feature), track the activity of devices on their home networks, and troubleshoot when things go wrong.

In addition, as you know we’re big proponents of RDK-B, where the B stands for “broadband.” It’s similar intent to RDK-V, video, which is the core foundation of our X1 UI. RDK-B is piled with techniques and technologies to continuously improve WiFi experiences.

KH: On the residential side, our offering, called Panoramic WiFi with the tagline of "It's wall to wall fast," has had an excellent take rate from a customer perspective. NPS (net promoter score) is up significantly. It's a combination of having a better in-home device, a professional install and additional to make sure your signal strength, location, quality of service is what you want it to be inside your premises. 

DH: Our WiFi strategy focuses on both raw hardware capabilities, and the software we use to optimize for value and performance. Both solve for whole home connectivity. We are constantly evaluating hardware-related developments and standards to include in the equipment we deploy in customers’ homes.

Alongside that, we are focused on software developments (embedded and cloud-based) to optimize WiFi range, reliability and performance. That means channel optimization, air time fairness, band- and client-steering. We have a range of embedded software and cloud-based services going to market in 2017 and 2018.

We’re also looking at the best ways to give our customers the right equipment to ensure whole home coverage, from point-of-sale to care. This includes developing a mix of property profiling (size, fabrication etc.) and machine learning techniques.

Making WiFi better for our customers is very much about giving them visibility and control.

Tech Roundtable 2015 | Revving Up to ‘Web Speed’

Ensuring all the hardware and technology we’re using works in harmony, such that the customer can see it, configure, it, and personalize it. We’re doing this with our “Connect” app, which – in addition to allowing them to manage their mobile tariffs and access hotspots while on the go -- brings all of this to the customer. Whether it’s parental controls, guest WiFi access, speed tests, onboarding of powerline devices, resetting passwords. It’s all the things our customers would and should expect. Meaning WiFi that consistently works well, with control in the palm of their hand.

JR: We’re currently deploying 802.11ac Wave 2 in the home, which has impressively nerdy feature names, like beam-steering and multi-user operation. Bottom line, they make the signals behave better in a given (and often hostile) environment. We’re also actively testing the benefits of 802.11ax, which works in both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz spectral areas and enables multi-gigabit speeds.

On top of that, we’re planning a 2018 deployment of cloud-based radio resource management, which is all about optimizing the WiFi experience -- it takes some of what’s traditionally been processed locally, and pulls it back into the network. And, we’re testing some distributed WiFi solutions, to expand indoor coverage.

MCN: Is 5G an opportunity for small cell and backhaul, or a threat to the last mile? (A little bit of both?)
JW: The business model [for 5G] kind of confuses me some. For the markets that Mediacom operates in, which are much lower density than maybe the average -- we're well below 50 homes a mile. Although we don’t have as many line-of-sight issues with many tall buildings, the reach of these very high frequencies are really going to limit their use in lower density markets. 

I realize that Verizon and others are talking about 5G...but it's starting to feel a lot like 3D, in that there's a ton of talk about it, but when you go and look at the engineering, this is not going to be like LTE. When 4G came along, it was really about enabling a new frequency and new, more efficient protocols. This is fundamentally a different architecture. You're not going to enable with this with macro towers; you're going to have to build a whole new network to do this. And it's going to cost a lot of money. I think they have the performance to compete with landlines, but I don't think they have the capacity...at any cost-effective rate to really compete with landline. 

JR: It’s both, but probably more of an opportunity for backhaul. I mean, in rural areas, or very non-dense areas, having a wireless option, vs. wired, may make sense. We’re testing 5G for both, but to us it looks better for fixed use cases. That’s because millimeter wave comes with very large channel sizes, that can offer very high bandwidth -- but at those frequencies, propagation can be really challenging. Anything in the line of sight -- a tree, a building -- can mess things up.

DH: We don’t see 5G as a threat to the last mile. For starters, the economics aren’t there, at least in the foreseeable future. Plus, a 5G last mile will not offer the performance equivalent to fiber rich and deep access networks.

Spectrally, 5G performance will require larger bandwidths, which implies higher frequency spectrum and the use of advanced radio technologies, such as Massive MIMO or coordinated multi-site transmissions.

Higher spectral bands imply denser deployments of radio access nodes (smaller cells) with more backhaul locations, so for sure there are opportunities to scale backhaul revenues here.

When asked what a good coverage 5G access network might look like, I often point to one of our cable access maps showing our WiFi hotspots.

Ultimately, it’s not a question of 5G or cable access in the last mile. More, it’s a question of how will 5G radio access and fixed, fiber-rich cable access complement each other. Just like how unlicensed WiFi radio access compliments fixed cable access today.

KH: It is a little bit of both. From a technical perspective, we're taking advantage of some of the small cell opportunities.  

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