"CT's Pipeline" will not publish next Tuesday. The editor will be on vacation, and publication will resume with the Oct. 16 issue.

FEATURE STORY
You Can't Fight It When City Hall Wants Cable Modems

There's been a great deal of dialogue recently in the engineering community about the technical issues surrounding the delivery of services to a new set of customers: the small- and medium-business (SMB) community. However, another sort of "SMB" that you might not have considered at length is local governments.

Perhaps you should start thinking about it. There's evidence that in the near future, a great deal more is going to occur between municipalities and cable ops by way of I-nets, data operations and joint facilities. That means your ability to reliably deliver advanced services to city hall is going to become all the more important in franchise negotiations and community relations. Just ask Jonathon Kramer, who has provided technology and policy advice and compliance inspections for nearly 400 government agencies and selected private institutions since 1984.

"Many cable operators are actively courting local governments to be able to provide those governments with Internet services and WAN connectivity," says Kramer, founder and principal RF technologist at Kramer.Firm Inc. (http://www.cabletv.com) and a senior member of SCTE, in an interview with Pipeline. As examples of this trend, Kramer points to the following projects in California:

• The city of Lakewood contracted with MediaOne (now AT&T Broadband) to construct and maintain a fiber ring loop to interconnect city hall with outlying government offices.
• Adelphia Cable in Redondo Beach constructed a fiber ring to interconnect selected locations with city hall.
• Modesto has an extensive coaxial INET provided by CableOne (later AT&T Broadband) serving hundreds of school and city locations.
• Cox Cable provides the city of Irvine with an internal wide area network consisting of dedicated and shared fibers, and cable modems, to connect city facilities.
• Another Cox system, in Santee, is providing 10 Mbps Internet service to city hall.

Municipalities also could become very interested in your ability to provide VoIP-based apps such as videoconferencing -- especially after the tragedies of Sept. 11. "Some governments have used videoconferencing in their emergency operations centers for years to connect people who otherwise can't physically meet due to events such as we've witnessed," Kramer explains.

Kramer warns that local government officials, like all end-users, don't care about the underlying technology that provides necessary connectivity. "They only care that the connectivity exists when they pick up the phone, when they boot up their computers, when they turn on their TV sets, and when they need to talk with and see their team."

ENGINEERING NEWS
Lotsa' Acronyms in this Tech Deal: S-A, PBC OK CMTS Deal

The last time you were exploring Scientific-Atlanta's (http://www.sciatl.com) booth at a trade show, you would have had to look pretty darn hard to find the company's CMTS offering. That's because there wasn't one. While heavy-hitters like ADC (http://www.adc.com), Motorola (http://www.gi.com) and others were talking up everybody's favorite four-letter data acronym, you didn't hear it from S-A, except maybe to say that it had made an investment in CMTS company, Pacific Broadband Communications (http://www.pbc.com).

But the next time you hit S-A's booth, you'll be able to check out a CMTS that provides 32 downstream channels and 128 upstream channels. The product uses custom-built chips that allow existing networks to use 16-QAM transmission within 3.2 MHz segments, effectively doubling or quadrupling the upstream data throughput.

If all this sounds familiar -- say like something you've heard from PBC -- that's because it is. S-A announced last week that it has penned a marketing agreement with PBC for the latter's CMTS, which is now dubbed the Prisma G10. S-A has exclusive marketing and distribution rights for North America and nonexclusive worldwide distribution rights. PBC has rights to market, sell and support the CMTS to ops outside North America.

S-A's VP of Net Architecture Paul Connolly tells Pipeline that you've been asking the company to add new data products into its core offerings, and the deal with PBC came naturally since S-A had already invested in the CMTS company. The agreement underscores S-A's commitment to offer ops "the ability to extract the most value from their networks at any point along the deployment curve," Connolly adds.

While engineers in the market for CMTSs showed a great deal of interest in PBC's technology, according to PBC VP of Worldwide Sales and Customer Support Mike Allen, you indicated concern when it came to support and service. With S-A's worldwide service resources and sales structure, those questions are going to be a lot easier for PBC to answer.

• Worm Your Way Out of This One-- "All of us are part of a larger community, and it really isn't cool to infect your neighbors," DSL provider Speakeasy said in an e-mail to its customers recently. What the company was referencing was worms like Code Red (both I and II) and Nimda, which have Speakeasy and a few other DSL providers disconnecting infected subs until they apply the necessary patches. In light of recent situations such as the one where Code Red knocked out e-mail servers at Cox Cable of Fairfax County, VA, will cable companies offering high-speed data do the same as Speakeasy and remove infected computers' access until they're patched?

  At deadline, no major MSOs reported they were cutting off cable modem service to computers affected by the worms. Time Warner and Cox Communications did indicate that they are monitoring their nets for infected computers, and passing patch info on to users.

CAREER ENGINEER
Want to Up Your Biz Acumen? How About Streaming Video (?)

The corporate world is eyeing video and audiostreaming, as companies continue to realize the benefits Webcasting offers in areas such as training and product promotion. The market for these Webcasting services among the top 1,000 U.S. companies will reach $2.8 billion in 2005, Jupiter Media Metrix analyst Billy Pidgeon says.

One company that has embraced e-learning for its employees worldwide is Motorola. The result is not only a reduction in costs, says Bill Wiggenhorn, president of the company's training division, but also a potential tripling in the time-efficiency of teaching.

E-learning is a cost-effective alternative to instructor-led training. Unlike classroom learning, streaming videos allow you or your team to learn anywhere -- at home, in a hotel, at your desk at work -- at a pace tailored to individual schedules.

An example of a company offering business videos via the Internet is OnlineNow.TV (http://www.brainware.tv) through its Brainware.tv products. It offers hundreds of streaming business video rentals and free previews in English and Spanish.

"We eliminate the time and physical costs of traditional video production and shipping," Phil Doyle, the company's chairman, says. "Companies throughout the world now provide streaming business videos to their customers and employees from their own logo-branded, syndicated sites that we create and maintain for them."

Brainware.tv'sstreaming offerings include, "How to Hire the Best Person Every Time," and "Effective Communications: It's Your Responsibility."

BROADBAND SOAPBOX
The Vendor Role in Educating the Engineering Community

In recent years, the amount of training offered by vendors has exploded. What is the vendor role in educating both new technical recruits and industry veterans? What do attendees cite as some of the best vendor-sponsored programs available? What kind of data is out there about how training improves operators' recruiting and retention potentials?

If you'd like to share your opinions with other readers on this topic, send an e-mail to . Responses may be edited for style or length.

SCTE ANNOUCEMENTS
Editor's Note

The SCTE Announcements will return in the next issue.

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