February 15, 2005
Vol.6, No. 7
In This Issue:
 

From Headend to NOC: The Shifting Center of Cable Technology
You didn’t have one of these eight years ago...

Do you know WiMAX?
A primer on IEEE 802.16...

Pipeline Profile

Keith Hayes

Making it Convenient for the Customer

Who’s Afraid of Competition?
Verizon to buy MCI. Competition beefs up. Are you worried?

Nominate a Standards Hero
Cast your ballots and submit more nominees...

Editor:

Feature Story

From Headend to NOC:
The Shifting Center of Cable Technology

Visiting a headend used to be one of the key ways to get your hands around cable technology. Back in the day (so I’m told) it might involve hopping in a pickup truck and heading up a mountain dirt road. More recently, it has meant visiting a building in a town or city connected to the big farm of satellite dishes.

But the center of gravity in cable technology has shifted. Ask someone senior enough about headends, and you’re likely to hear: “Let me show you my NOC (network operations center).” And what you’ll see is a windowless, environmentally hardened building surrounded by more power supplies than satellite dishes.

Headend in the Home

Of course, headends still exist, likely enough on elevated real estate. But something obvious has happened to cable’s earth-station headends over the past decade: they’ve been bypassed by millions of customers who’ve stuck dishes on the sides of their houses.

A second wave of headend-to-the-home technology is in the offing, this time driven by the cable industry. Shuttling digital video around the home, for instance, has entailed putting QAM modulators in master set-tops. The industry’s transition to all-digital networks may also fuel this trend.

The problem is how to serve the millions of analog TV sets that currently receive cable video services. As a solution, the industry may push additional functions traditionally found at the headend into sophisticated chipsets aimed at serving that legacy base.

NOCS I have known

Manufacturers may figure out how to put a headend on a chip, but the headend-to-the-home trend only amplifies the parallel evolution of cable into a network provider. Or as Gene White, Bright House Networks VP engineering, Tampa, says: “We’ve moved from a broadcast service to a switch service.”

Bright House Networks' NOC in Brandon, Florida is a good example of how far cable has come. “When we first built Road Runner in this division, it was called LineRunner, and I started with three or four people in 1997,” White says.

“Right now, in my division, in my NOC, I have about 100 people, who are responsible for the very high-end network: the computers, the SONET gear, the ATM gear,” explains White. “I’ve got 20,000 IP business customers. I run my own VoIP phone switch. And that’s a whole group of people that cable didn’t have ten years ago.”

While a facility that serves 72 hubs in 7 counties is far removed from a single earth station on a hill, the same pioneering, can-do spirit seems to have animated both kinds of technical deployments. “We didn’t know how to build a NOC, we just built it,” White says.

- Jonathan Tombes

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Career Engineer

Catch SCTE Live Learning Wednesday Covering WiMAX

How much do you know about WiMAX? How much do you need to know? Catch SCTE Live Learning™ tomorrow Wednesday, Feb. 16, for a live, interactive, web-based seminar on WiMAX that is free to SCTE members.

SCTE Live Learning™ is sponsored by Cisco Systems, Fujitsu, Scientific-Atlanta, and Motorola. The presenter for the February event will be Randy Eisenach with Fujitsu Network Communications. Get details and register at http://www.scte.org/events/index.cfm?pID=940.

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Broadband Soapbox

Competition: Which Bump in the Night Scares You Most?

Verizon’s agreement to buy MCI could mean a stronger competitive threat. Last month at SCTE’s Emerging Technologies Conference, there was lots of talk of the widening array of technologies that can compete with cable’s HFC nets. These included fiber-to-the-home (FTTH), improved variants of DSL, new land-based wireless technologies and good-old DBS.

Which technology or technologies do you think have the best chances against cable’s big pipe? If you’d like to share your opinions with other readers, send an email to .

All letters may be published and edited for style or length.

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SCTE Announcements

Who Is Outstanding in Standards?

SCTE is pleased to announce a brand new award that will showcase the standard development talents of an SCTE Standards Program participant. Check out the criteria and nominate someone today for the inaugural presentation of the SCTE Excellence in Standards Award. http://www.scte.org/membership/index.cfm?pID=1191

Cast Your Ballot in the 2005 SCTE Board Election!

If you have not received your SCTE Board Election 2005 voter packet yet, please contact SCTE at . Members in Regions 1, 2, 6, 9, and 11 will vote for their Regional Director. All members, regardless of region, will vote for two Director-At-Large candidates. Open your election packet, read up on the candidates, and cast your paper ballot or, better yet, vote online using your ballot control number located in your packet. Candidate profiles and the election booklet also are available online. http://www.scte.org/membership/index.cfm?pID=1190

Nominees Wanted for SCTE Top Member, Hall of Fame, and Safety Awards

Take a moment and put someone in the running for SCTE Member of the Year (sponsored by Motorola) and the SCTE Hall of Fame. Also, SCTE Safety Awards (sponsored by GFC) are up for nominations. http://www.scte.org/news/detail.cfm?ID=330

Cable Tech for the Non-Tech Pro

SCTE and CTPAA (Cable Television Public Affairs Association) to Present a Crash Course in Broadband Technology. It’s set for Sunday, May 1 in Washington, D.C. Get details at http://www.scte.org/news/detail.cfm?ID=335.

Arment, Nobles, Gordon-Kanouff, Sharp…

…Kinsman, Gaillard, Calhoun, Martin, Anderson, and Bergman . Who will follow these past winners as the 2005 Women in Technology Award recipient? Nominations are being accepted. Get details/submit a name. http://www.scte.org/news/detail.cfm?ID=328

SCTE Chapter Leadership Conference (CLC) 2005 Coming in April

Hold the dates—Thursday and Friday, April 14–15 in Philadelphia. Stay tuned for registration details. http://www.scte.org/events/index.cfm?pID=279

Purchase VoIP Service Quality: Measuring and Evaluating Packet-Switched Voice

In this book byWilliam C. Hardy, learn everything you need to know about determining quality of service for implementing Voice over IP. Visit the SCTE Bookstore at http://www.scte.org/acb/stores/2/product1.asp?SID=2&Product_ID=289.

Discover New Opportunities with SCTE’s Career Center

It’s powered by BroadbandCareers.Com. SCTE’s Career Center is part of an expanded Broadband Careers Network offering job seekers and employers greater visibility across a targeted audience in the broadband, telecommunications and IP industries. Visit the SCTE Career Center today at http://scte.broadbandcareers.com/Default.asp. Questions? Call .

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Information

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Pipeline Profile

Keith Hayes

Making it Convenient for the Customer

SCTE Member Since 1991

Title: VP, HFC Technical Operations and Engineering, Adelphia Communications.

Broadband Background:

Previously, Hayes was VP of network planning and construction at Adelphia, where he worked with the regional Adelphia teams to upgrade more than 30,000 miles in less than two years. He is a past chairman of the board of SCTE, and he served two terms as director of SCTE Region 9, representing Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and the Caribbean.

You’ve added one more feather to your illustrious cap. What do you have to say about the Star of Integrity Award that you received at the SCTE’s Conference on Emerging Technologies?

That award should be the Adelphia Star of Integrity Award. Because everything that I was recognized for were things that the Adelphia team accomplished. They rebuilt 20-plus percent of our plant in 18 months, they advanced operational improvements that drove tens of thousands of unnecessary truck calls out of our business each month. And that’s a 15,000-employee effort to make those kinds of things happen.

What’s been the biggest change in Adelphia?

The biggest change has been in the culture, from one that was ‘do what is convenient for the business’ to now one that does what is convenient for the customer. We do that by changing our work practices so that they are more customer friendly, so that our windows of work are friendly both in terms of being able to get to your house to do installation or service repair when it is convenient for you and also ensuring that we keep our network on during prime use hours, both video and data.

How do you bring about this kind of change?

The first thing is to articulate the reasons why change is important. That’s done by finding ways that show the importance of our actions to our customer experience. It’s things like showing a video tape of a very intense movie and at the climax of the scene, pulling the plug on the TV so that you see ten seconds of snow and then plugging it back in and using that as an example of what our customers experience when we pull and amplifier or a pad or an equalizer in the middle of the day.

So it’s putting yourself in your customers’ shoes?

Exactly. I tell my team to act as if everything we do is going to affect their grandmother.

Is that a challenge across the board, beyond Adelphia?

Absolutely. The more competitive the business is, the more important it is that we deliver customer excellence at every contact: in our scheduling windows, in our rates and programming, in our phone-answering capability. We’ve got to be at least as good as DirecTV, Dish Network and the RBOCs, and preferably better. Because our customers clearly have a choice, and it’s simply a phone call away in most markets to switch their service. We all know how hard it is to gain new customers, so we’ve got to make sure that we deliver an experience that will make it tough for our customers to walk away from us.

In a more competitive landscape, how is cable going to keep its technical teams intact?

It’s key that our technical people see a forward path in their career. Adelphia along with other cable operators have developed career paths so that if you want to specialize in maintenance, for example, there are ways to maximize your earning potential. Or if you want to move up the technical management ladder, there are ways to develop those skill sets. Rather than being ad hoc, there’s a road map there and there are tools available to the technician in terms of training or development resources that the companies provide through SCTE, NCTI and others that give them skills they need to move to the next level.

How many frequent flyer miles have you racked up over the past year?

That’s a painful question. In excess of 100,000—on Delta alone.

Is it slowing down?

Yes and no. There are weeks that I’ll only go one place. But there are other weeks where I’ll be in three or four different states, like next week.