Top Guns

BY ANTHONY CRUPI

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) Cable-Tec Expo. And while most attendees will be craning their necks to get a look at all the new gear on display, we thought we'd pull focus a bit and look at the people behind the tech.

To that end, here are six people who've stepped up their game, a half-dozen innovators responsible for some of the most intriguing developments in the cable arena.

Although the narrative of each individual's professional development is as unique as the whorls of their fingerprints, the stories they share do have some common elements. (There is, for example, much tinkering in garages with prototypes, the first lightning strikes of inspiration and, in one case, rockets.)

But they're not the only ones that SCTE members will honor this week. For his instrumental role in the society's major standards expansion and the launching of its Operación Español diversity program, SCTE president and CEO John Clark was named one of nine winners of the NCTA's 2003 Vanguard Awards. Clark says that this year's show promises to be the most expanded and inclusive in two decades. It will reflect the society's expanded mission of service to its members, and its ongoing commitment to professional development.

?We undergo a strategic update every four years,? Clark says. ?This time around, our mission is evolutionary, not revolutionary.?

As a bonus, for the first time in history, the Cable-Tec Expo is being held in Philadelphia, home to the SCTE and within throwing distance of almost 40% of its members. Clark has referred to the show as ?the planes, trains and automobiles event.?

Hop aboard and enjoy the ride ? and the read.

Marcie Anderson didn't need a stint in the U.S. Army to learn how to become a leader. She's been one since birth.

?Growing up with three brothers, I ruled the roost,? she says. ?You know how it is, girls are always quicker to mature. And because I was always in charge, I've always been comfortable around men.?

In an industry that's overwhelmingly male, Anderson, the VP of business development at Cox Communications Northern Virginia, stands out, and not just on the basis of her gender. Her 12-year career has been marked by a string of successful product launches, followed in rapid succession by promotions.

Anderson got her first taste of high tech during her six-year run in the Army. ?I wanted to do air traffic control, but they didn't have any openings,? she explains. ?So they placed me in air traffic control repair. That's how I fell into the electronics field, although I have a feeling I would have stumbled into it sooner or later.?

Upon being honorably discharged, Anderson took her first civilian tech job, doing installations of access and transport nodes for Northern Telecom in Phoenix. A short stint at Sprint PCS in Phoenix followed, wherein she helped launch the telco's cellular network.

In 1997, Anderson joined Cox Phoenix as a team leader, where she was instrumental in successfully launching the system's telephone service. ?I had done some installations for Cox with Nortel in their Orange County system, which was their first phone launch,? she explains. She became so proficient at overseeing MBU launches that Cox's corporate headquarters in Atlanta earmarked her to take over its residential telephony initiative.

?Once I got there, they told me that there weren't enough telephony launches to keep me occupied,? Anderson says. ?So I signed on as director of data operations. I got back into HSD, which is one of the things I learned to do in the Army.?

In her new role, Anderson was instrumental in the nationwide transitioning of Cox's HSD customers from Excite and Road Runner services to Cox's self-managed service under its Cox High Speed Internet brand.

In 2002, she made a final move, leading the HD launch team in Cox's Northern Virginia system.

After all the groundbreaking work she's put in over the course of her career, Anderson is getting some well-deserved recognition. To honor her accomplishments, Women in Cable & Telecommunications and the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers are presenting her with the 2003 Women in Technology Award. Last year's winner, Christy Martin, of Canal Plus Technologies, will present Anderson with the award at an honorary luncheon on May 12 during SCTE's Cable-Tec Expo 2003.

And as always, Anderson is proud to lead by example. ?I think women need to get more comfortable with tech. With me, it's just a matter of digging in.

?We have to be ready to offer up our opinions. Be vocal, but be ready to share responsibility for the team's decisions.?

Things might have been so very different for Darryl DeFreese. Were it not for divine intervention and what might charitably be called the less-than-stringent admissions requirements of the University of Georgia, N2 Broadband's principal architect and co-founder might be wasting away in a garret somewhere.

?My goal was to be a starving artist,? DeFreese says. ?I got interested in photography when I was in high school, and I was pretty sure that that was the direction I was heading.?

After familiarizing himself with his school's 8-bit microprocessor, DeFreese decided to hedge his bets by driving a bargain with the deity. ?I made a deal with God,? he recalls. ?I said I was going to apply to one college, and if I got accepted, I'd go into tech. If not, I was going to be an artist.?

When the fat envelope arrived from Athens, telling DeFreese that he was officially a Bulldog, he dove into university life with a singularity of purpose. He racked up three times the number of credits necessary to earn a degree in computer science, and spent whatever free time he could scrounge up polishing his key punch skills, even though he was convinced that card mainframes were going the way of the Ford Pinto.

After launching his first startup in the early '80s, DeFreese began to familiarize himself with telecom. Cable was still a fairly esoteric entity at the time, but DeFreese's position at Scientific-Atlanta provided a back door into the emergent CATV space.

?I wound up helping to build the first digital cable system that S-A worked on,? DeFreese says. ?Still, I always thought of it as a computer network, not cable. What we were doing wasn't building a cable system; we were really building an emulation of a cable network on a computer platform.?

After six years at S-A, certain inconsistencies kept nagging at him. ?The same questions started popping up over and over again. ?How do we do our billing?? ?How do I manage a computer in the head-end?? There were no standards for these kind of things at all.?

These questions were the germ behind N2 Broadband. Once DeFreese and his team had the S-A digital network up and running, there was little left for him to do. Along with co-architect Tim Addington, DeFreese left the company and began the initial work of starting up N2.

Both engineers had only the vaguest sense of what N2's contribution to the industry might be, although it was apparent that it would have to be an application-driven, standards-based enterprise. ?There was no grand strategy,? DeFreese admits.

N2's track record over the last three years suggests otherwise. In rapid succession, the startup played a key role in the standardization of VOD formats with its Interactive Services Architecture (a universal head-end approach it developed in conjunction with Time Warner Cable), rolled out its Xport VOD management product line and introduced its platform-agnostic OpenStream initiative. On top of that, N2 has managed to raise several million in operating capital.

Not bad for a bunch of guys who claim to not have known what they were doing.

But the carte blanch approach has always been DeFreese's default mode. ?The less that's drawn out beforehand, the happier I am,? he says. ?I'm the kind of guy, I see a blank piece of paper and my blood pressure just goes way down. Because I know that I can draw a nice picture in that white space and in that picture everything will be beautiful.?

Spoken like a true artist.

Although Mark Dzuban has long been associated with cable telephony, the first time he helped put a ringing in someone's ears had more to do with explosions than Ma Bell. As a boy, Dzuban was a typical '50s-era backyard rocket enthusiast. With the help of his father, a Westinghouse engineer who later went on to work on lunar landing modules for the Apollo missions, Dzuban amassed an arsenal of missiles constructed from powdered zinc and sulfur packed into toilet paper tubes.

As is the case with all missile programs, escalation was inevitable. Cross-currents of talk about the physiology of gravitational pull on other planets and German military hardware led Dzuban's father to propose building a ramjet ? a simple, air-breathing propulsion engine ? on the family's picnic table.

In retrospect, this may not have been such a hot idea.

?It was extremely dangerous,? Dzuban says. ?As the fuel expanded ? we used gasoline ? the thing just started screaming. The flame was 10 or 15 feet long, and the thrust dragged the picnic table halfway across the yard.?

While Dzuban's rocketry days are over (he prefers to spend his leisure time fishing in nearby Hatteras, N.H.), that early sense of experimentation remains intact. An early architect of telephony systems over cable networks, Dzuban recently emerged from semi-retirement to take a position as EVP of cable telephony deployment at Cedar Point Communications.

?Mark Galvin from Cedar Point took some of the information I volunteered and built a platform that was consistent with where I thought the industry should go,? Dzuban says. ?Initially, I was the chairman of their advisory board, but then I decided to join them full time last July. Hey, I didn't want them to have all the fun themselves.?

Dzuban was the obvious choice for the Cedar Point gig, as he is one of the few people active in the cable telephony space today who can truly say he was around when the idea first began to germinate. One of the early engineers of cable voice- and data-transmission technology at AT&T's Bell Labs, Dzuban's seminal white paper directly led to the establishment of AT&T Broadband.

At AT&T, Dzuban implemented telephony service throughout the merged TCI/Media One Systems. The project has evolved to the point where over 500,000 subscribers have been implemented.

?Initially, AT&T was only interested in circuit switch telephony,? Dzuban says. ?They knew it well and had the technical resources to carry it out.?

That said, Dzuban acknowledges that there was always a bit of a disconnect between the class-5 and soft switch camps. ?There has always been some static between the traditional phone guys and the cable upstarts.?

Dzuban ultimately left AT&T to form Hatteras House Consulting, a firm that looked to push acceptance of IP tech among VC types. Through his work with Hatteras he became familiar with Cedar Point.

Although the development of VoIP can be characterized as a slow creep, Dzuban's a born evangelist and a true believer.

?We've got a very sophisticated, very powerful platform,? he says. ?Next year there'll be some pretty significant rollouts. I believe it's on the way.?

Ran Oz doesn't do anything by half measures. BigBand Networks' CTO and co-founder had already launched two tech companies when his call to military service (Oz is an Israeli) pulled him away from his wife and children in the mid-1990s.

He was 25.

While Oz spent four years pulling duty in San Diego, his friend and fellow entrepreneur, Amir Bassan-Eskenazi, was beginning to become involved in the then-dormant field of digital video. Whenever Oz returned to Tel Aviv, he would meet up with Bassan-Eskenazi and discuss the business plan the two men had begun to cobble together based upon their complementary tech backgrounds.

As is the case in so many other startup ventures, neither Oz nor Bassan-Eskenazi were completely clear on the exact nature of the business they planned on launching.

?When we started, we weren't sure what we were going to do,? Oz recalls. ?We had to really take a long look at the market so that we could learn what it needed and what was missing.?

In 1999, Oz earned his discharge and subsequently returned to Israel. He didn't stay put for long. As the partners began work on the prototype of what would become BigBand's core product, the Broadband Multimedia-Service-Router (BMR), Oz flew to and from the United States, making the acquaintance of cable operators such as AT&T Broadband, Time Warner Cable and Cablevision.

?Instead of handling one specific application, we designed our platform to do media processing,? he says. ?We knew that we could support different applications as the market grew.?

As American interest in BigBand continued to grow, the partners decided to try and gain a foothold in the States. An initial funding drive raised over $20 million from VC firms such as Redpoint Ventures, which convinced Oz that it was time to hang a shingle in California, where the money was.

The integration of Israeli switching and IP tech with American video and signal processing took some time to integrate. ?We built the BMR from the chip level up,? Oz says. ?Other companies have tried to merge boxes, to force an integration, but that isn't the way to go. You have got to build from the ground up.?

You must also pay close attention to the needs of your customers. Although some cable operators were very interested in BigBand's ability to provide ITV scalability, the company continued to stress that it was not limited to handling a single application. As cable's initial enthusiasm for ITV began to wane in 2000, BigBand recognized what would become a major shift in priorities, and began marketing the BMR accordingly.

That kind of perspicacity informs BigBand's overall business philosophy. Oz and Bassan-Eskenazi pride themselves on their ability to see well over the horizon.

?Three years ago when we said that video will move over GigE transport, people thought we were crazy,? Oz says. ?Now everybody uses GigE transport. Not so crazy now, are we??

It's not always easy parsing the signal from the noise when a telecom announces a technological breakthrough. Hype is as infectious as cooties and twice as dangerous, yet no one is wholly inured to its charms, especially when it seems to make good on a promise that's beneficial to the entire industry.

Net2Phone chairman Howard Jonas is a walking hype machine, an entrepreneur who has raised the act of guileless self-promotion to an art form. But regardless of what one may think about the former frankfurter hawker's methods, it's hard to argue with his track record.

A little more than a year ago, at the home office of Liberty Cablevision of Puerto Rico, Jonas presided over the first fully managed end-to-end IP telephony call over a broadband network. Predicting that the call between himself and Liberty Media chairman John Malone's Denver residence would one day stand as ?the most famous call of the 21st century,? Jonas officially inaugurated the VoIP era.

While VoIP has stalled at the gate in the contiguous United States, the Puerto Rico trial continues to be a slow, steady success. Net2Phone VP of Broadband Technology Michael Pastor says the company has ramped up to Phase 2B, having scaled to about 1,000 subs at the end of April.

?Usage and corresponding revenue are meeting or exceeding our expectations,? Pastor says. ?Once we began our premium service in January of this year, the average customer billing has been $40 a month.?

Net2Phone now offers two residential plans through Liberty Cable, Pastor says. One is a basic service offering local calls and voice features for $19.95 per month, plus metered long-distance calls in Puerto Rico and the United States. Its deluxe offering, the amusingly branded ?Celebrity? plan, consists of unlimited local calls and voice features plus four hours of Puerto Rico and U.S. calls, for $39.95.

Thus far, complaints about jitter or latency have been few and far between. ?There's an algorithm that generates a corresponding MOS score to determine the quality of voice calls over our network. On a scale of 1 to 5, we're averaging a 4.2,? Pastor says.

Net2Phone calls are routed directly from each Liberty sub's existing landline, where they are patched into Motorola's embedded multimedia terminal adapter (eMTA). From there, they pass over the HFC network to Motorola's BSR 64000 CMTS. The call is then routed to the Net2Phone managed soft-switch, which rates, manages, provisions and bills the call and routes it over IP networks to the closest gateway to the recipient. Finally, the call is transferred to the PSTN and directed to a telephone on the other end.

The entire connection process takes mere seconds, and each Net2Phone call is in real time.

Pastor believes that the two MSOs that have shown the most interest in offering VoIP service, Comcast and Cox, are still in the hunt, regardless of recent delays. ?From Comcast's perspective, I think it's less about whether they are unsure if VoIP is ready or not,? he says. ?It's more about the fact that they have acquired an infrastructure that needs to be updated and brought into order with the rest of their services.?

As for Cox, the Atlanta-based op has constant bit rate service today, and remains gung-ho on soft-switch, Pastor says. ?Maybe it won't happen overnight, but you'll definitely see Cox go forward with VoIP.?

It may not qualify as hype, but those words still rang in loud and clear.

For a man whose raison d'etre is speed, Hillel Weinstein speaks with a deliberation that verges on the mechanical. Perhaps he's just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up with him.

The co-founder and CEO of Xtend Networks, an Israeli bandwidth-boosting outfit, Weinstein says that his product can stretch hybrid fiber-coaxial capacity to an unheard-of 3 gigs for around $100 per subscriber.

Weinstein has been in the tech space long enough to know that demand doesn't always necessarily follow from innovation, no matter how promising a contraption may seem to its inventor. (Think about it: You probably haven't seen too many of those Segways out there, no matter how many times a breathless TV news feature informed you that the scooters would change the face of transportation.)

?We've seen that many users are dissatisfied with their data rates,? Weinstein says. ?We've heard from one cable company whose customers are no longer satisfied with the 200 Kbps they're getting. They want 2 Mbps.?

Xtend creates an overlay bandwidth path above an existing 750- or 860-MHz network. Components in the Xtend system include an upconverter at the fiber node, a bypass device hooked to each amplifier and, at the user end, a downconverter that translates higher-frequency signals into either the set-top or modem.

The installation process, Weinstein contends, takes about six hours.

?We're tackling the SMB market right now in the United States,? he says. ?The operators who are looking at our products can see that we can offer T1-type data rates at a fraction of the cost of telecom T1.?

By simply adding its components to the existing network, Xtend offers a no-fuss, no-muss upgrade without all the hassle of digging or splitting.

?The amplifiers in use today were developed decades ago, and they are now outdated. Our technology simply allows for more efficient use of the existing coaxial cables.?

Field trials with ?one of the top five? MSOs will begin next week, Weinstein says. At present, Xtend is deployed in Israel through Golden Channels.

Weinstein co-founded Xtend in 1999 with business partner and CTO Zeev Orbach. The men had first crossed paths in the early 1970s, when Weinstein was developing a method of transmitting data over broadcast TV channels. After running a series of experiments in a garage, they came to the conclusion that their last mile solution was indeed feasible.

A cash infusion from Giza/General Electric VC in 2000 enabled the partners to put together an actual lab with modern facilities.

While Xtend remains focused on data transmission, Weinstein says the company will expand to serve the video market as well. ?As VOD and high-definition TV begin to take hold in America, operators will start feeling the drain on their bandwidth.?

Already we're starting to see adoption rates escalate on both bandwidth-gobbling video services. Weinstein likens the leap from HD to SD to the gradual move from black-and-white to color TV. ?No one thought much about color. It was seen as a luxury. Then Bonanza began to be broadcast in color and that pushed everyone over the line.?

But just how necessary is that 3-gig stretch today? Weinstein responds in his measured, genial manner: ?It may take some time to reach the limits of the 750-MHz cable plant, but it will happen. And we'd like to be there to help when it does.?