Engineers Need Broader View

BRIAN SANTO

Looking beyond cable O.k., I know the Emerging Technologies Conference in New Orleans last week was by and for the Society for Cable Telecommunications Engineers, but the whole event was almost ludicrously parochial.

Much of the badinage was about how to configure a cable network that can be flexibly and gradually expanded enough to offer each new service as consumers begin to demand it, and do so at a reasonable cost. Which, granted, is absolutely critical to the continued vitality and growth of the cable industry.

Missing in action was the "big picture," the forest rather than the trees, context, a Weltanschaung.

A tangent here for those interested only in a technology update: There are no emerging technologies that haven't been emerging for a while. There were some new network systems and new network configurations - and don't think I'm trivializing the innovation and effort that went into devising them. But a fascinating new twist on how to implement a cable network is a detail, not an "emerging technology."

Back to our regularly scheduled rant: There was a woeful lack of recognition that cable facilities are now just a part of a larger network. This trend toward a network-at-large is happening slowly and extremely fitfully, and the homogeneity has more to do with the network's appearances to the end-customer than with the way it is built and the way it functions.

You'd never know there was something fundamental going on in the network-at-large if you were at SCTE Emerging Technologies. There was minimal input, technical or otherwise, about competitors (let alone from competitors).

This is a problem, and you all know why. Remember when the idea for HDTV arose?

The cable industry came up with MPEG and did some absolutely brilliant work creating it. It was on its way to being certified and accepted, and then the consumer electronics guys realized they'd have to use the standard, and they wanted to inspect it and maybe offer some changes, so MPEG got sucked back into committee. Years went by, and it almost emerged from committee again when the computer guys realized they'd have to deal with MPEG video, too, and they wanted to inspect it and maybe suggest some changes. MPEG got sucked back into the committee process from whence it didn't emerge for another few years.

There's a double-sided lesson here. The obverse is that if the cable industry does something with technology, it pays to involve related industries from the beginning, lest they become a hindrance either through late participation or due to conflicts that arise out of whatever cable industry has done. The reverse is to pay attention - much closer attention - to what related industries are doing, lest you get left out in the cold.

If cable operators want to do telephony, host Web services and provide data services, they had better start looking at what's happening beyond the cozy confines of their individual HFC plants, because activities out there may - probably will - affect them profoundly.