NOTE:  An edited subset of this post will appear in the 30th Anniversary Issue of Multichannel News, November 1, 2010.

When I first joined the cable industry with Scientific Atlanta, back in April of 1981, Multichannel News was just a fledgling magazine that had been in circulation less than a year; 330 MHz analog-only, one-way plant was the norm, and according to the NCTA web-site, there were about 30 programming channels available for distribution to our subscribers – not necessarily that all of our cable plant had the bandwidth to be able to distribute that many channels.  The industry at the time just didn’t seem that “high-tech” to this young idealistic engineer who had graduated from Georgia Tech just a few short years prior.  Technologically, it just wasn’t all that exciting!  Keep in mind that this was also the era of the beginnings of the personal computer industry with both Microsoft and Apple Computer having been started within the last 5 years. But frankly, Scientific Atlanta was close to home, and with a brand-new baby daughter in tow, family won-out in the job search when the headhunter came calling.  Never in my wildest dreams did I ever believe I would stick with the CATV industry for 30 – plus years, but WOW am I glad I did!  What a wild ride it has been, and what a remarkable technological evolution this industry has experienced over the last 30 years.  Through this amazing technological transformation, we’ve created an incredible broadband, digital-communications network that will hold us in good stead for many, many more years to come.

In the early ‘80’s, the cable industry was in a classic “land grab”.  It was focused on building out miles-and-miles of plant to get more-and-more homes-passed, while adding bandwidth to accommodate the many new cable-programming channels that were springing up.  We saw plant bandwidth grow in steps through upgrades and rebuilds from 300 MHz to 330 MHz, to 400 MHz, to 450 MHz , and then to 550 MHz.  But technologically speaking, we had become our own worst enemy, and victims of our wonderful success.  As our networks continued to grow to reach more customers, so did our amplifier cascades – along with their inherent noise and reliability problems.  Industry engineers had known for years that the future success of the CATV industry would be dependant on an excellent two-way communications infrastructure for an “interactive” future, and that continued linear growth of our network infrastructure – by adding miles-and-miles of additional amplifiers – simply wasn’t sustainable.  So in the early ‘80s we were an industry in need of a solution to this dilemma – and quick.

In the mid to late ‘80’s, the industry began experimenting with fiber-optics as a possible solution.  At first, Jim Chiddix, ex TWC CTO extraordinaire, and his team at Oceanic Cablevision (a division of ATC at the time) began to look at analog fiber optics as a “super-trunking” solution – a way to transport analog video over long distances as a lower-cost, more-reliable replacement for the FM coaxial transport solution in place at the time.  In fact, in his 1986 NCTA Technical Paper on the subject, Jim concluded: “For point-to-point transmission of video and other CATV system signals, analog transmission via fiber is an option which simply must be considered”.    And THAT simple statement, my friends, in my humble opinion, was THE profound understatement that set the tone and direction for the industry for the next three decades.  In a way that only Chiddix could say it (I can actually hear it rumbling out of his mouth), the direction, and a future network solution for the industry, was set.

On the services side, even back in the late 1980s’, the industry was all about “choice”.  Back in 1987 at Cox, for example, we offered 50 analog channels and a service we called Home Premium Theater that allowed our customers to access first-run movies at the same time they were available at home video stores.  As I’ve said before, even then we provided our customers with a choice: you can either leave your house to rent a movie or simply stay inside and watch one on cable.  The sales pitch was really quite similar to today’s:  choice and convenience, but “choice”, as defined back then, was a far cry from the “choice” we offer our subscribers today.

Fiber deployment to minimize cascades, reduce noise, improve network reliability, and frankly to give our dreams of a two-way interactive future a snow-balls chance of success, really began in earnest in the early 1990s – and coincidently around the time I made the switch from Scientific Atlanta to be CTO of Jones Intercable – a top-ten MSO at the time which was eventually gobbled-up by Comcast.  But fiber deployment not only did the above very important things to “fix” our network growth-pains, but it also provided a very critical benefit to future-proofing the network – the ability to segment the network into smaller and smaller service areas where the programming (or services) provided to (or received from) that area could be tailored specifically for the customers on that portion of the plant.

It wasn’t long after this extensive deployment of fiber began that the industry’s top cable engineers began to feel that they really had something to boast about here – a technological marvel that could carry the industry well into the future.  And so, around this time, my good friend, mentor, and predecessor as CTO of Cox Communications, Alex Best, was so enamored with the future of this new fiber-optic network infrastructure, he began looking for a way to set the technology tone and direction for the company and it’s employees, and to easily describe to industry analysts and pundits on Wall Street the power of the new hybrid-fiber-coax (HFC) network that his team was building at Cox.  And so he settled, way back then, on “The Winning Network” as the Cox mantra for the HFC network upgrade that was about to begin.

To this day, I can’t think of a better, more appropriate, or more inspiring moniker for the network that this industry has in place today, and will evolve in the future, than “The Winning Network”.  After joining Cox as their CTO, when Alex retired, I continued to use that moniker for many more years as we continued to drive fiber deeper in the network, add even more bandwidth, and add and grow our new services like residential and business telephone, high-speed internet, and other commercial services.  For years I tried to find an even better or more inspiring slogan to describe our network of the future – but I could never come up with anything even close.  As we continued to extend our network bandwidth at Cox to 1GHz, and drive fiber even deeper, and began the drive toward the deployment of OCAP (true2way) and the multitude of new interactive services that it would enable, we eventually coined the term The Extendible Optical Network (EON for short).  But “The Winning Network” is still my choice as the best and most appropriate description – ever.

I still believe that the industry’s extendible optical network will continue to be “The Winning Network”, for many, many years to come.  Its flexibility as an architecture, when combined with its economics, and when compared to other architectures like FTTH, is very hard to beat, and this has been proven to industry engineers time and time again.

For example, when hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans back in 2005, we just knew that we would have to start from scratch and rebuild the city with a brand-new network.  So we took off the HFC “blinders” and explored all of our possible options, including FTTH, for the rebuild.  We looked at it from all possible angles including available upstream and downstream bandwidth, the potential products and services it would support for many years to come, as well as the operational and maintenance costs.  Interestingly enough, a “passive” HFC network designed at Node+0 (fiber node with zero amplifiers in cascade), but initially implemented at Node+1, with one amplifier after the fiber node, came out on top!  Yes, even then HFC came out as the winner.

Several years later we embarked on an in-depth network evolution study to try and better understand the mix of products and services that The Extendible Optical Network, The Winning Network, would need to support over the next 10 – 15 years.  We wanted a better understanding of the evolution of the HFC plant that would be required, as well as some of the other technology tools that would be needed to support all of those new products and services.

As we looked to the future on this 10 – 15 year horizon we envisioned an all-digital (no analog) world that included around 400 high-definition channels (a large percentage at 1080P), along with an equal number of digital standard-definition channels.  We envisioned that VoD would continue to grow substantially, and that practically ALL of our VoD streams would be in HD in that timeframe.  We considered the interest and potential growth in 3DTV.  We envisioned substantial growth in residential high-speed Internet subscribers, and many with well over 125 MB/s downstream speeds along with (with even faster growth rates) large numbers of commercial Internet and business-Ethernet subscribers at “committed information rates” with similar and growing speeds. And we envisioned significant growth in IP video as part of the high-speed Internet mix – and eventually began planning for IP simulcast and TV everywhere.  We envisioned significant growth in interactive services and advanced advertising, as enabled by tru2way and EBIF.  We planned for continued growth in VoIP telephone to both residential and business customers, with advanced custom-calling feature sets.  We considered the significant shift in required upstream data speeds as subscriber usage patterns would shift to require any content, anywhere, anytime and to any device.  Oh, and we began to model the need for wireless backhaul as well.

Throughout all of that planning for future growth in new products and new services, with everything that we could think to throw at it in the way of customer demand, and with all of those services’ ensuing demands for bandwidth and reliability, the Extendible Optical Network, our good old HFC network, would continue its evolution as the network of choice – The Winning Network.  But it did so in concert with a host of other technology tools we have in the old proverbial tool chest, including:

• Driving fiber deeper – to further reduce the number of subscribers per node and thus multiply the bandwidth available to and from them.
• Switched digital video – to conserve required video bandwidth by switching on to the network only those channels that are being watched.  In the limit, SDV could ultimately become a unicast model (one stream per user) instead of multicast (one stream watched by many users).
• MPEG4 for more efficient video compression in combination with statistical multiplexing and strong closed-loop video encoding.
• DOCSIS 3.0’s ability for 24-28 Channel Bonding for 1 GHz speeds
• DOCSIS 4.0 (or whatever we want to call it) for even more efficient bandwidth utilization and higher-speeds.
• Reduction/removal of analog video programming to eliminate those really big bandwidth hogs.
• Adaptive bit-rate IP streaming to more efficiently stream IP video to multiple consumer platforms including the TV, PC, and portable and mobile devices.
• Advanced and more efficient (higher order QAM) modulation techniques in both the upstream and downstream networks – which will allow even more services in a given amount of bandwidth.
• DWDM as “virtual fiber” in fiber-limited portions of the network

The power and extendibility of our HFC network continues to be unmatched and future-proof with virtually limitless channel capacity.  It is robust, flexible, and reliable, and continues to be the most cost-effective approach to managing incremental bandwidth needs on an evolutionary, fiber-deeper, just-in-time basis.  And while the sales pitch may be the same as in 1986, the choice and convenience we provide our customers today, and well into the future, are orders of magnitude greater.  Many bandwidth challenges lie ahead, but we have the tools, technologies, and engineers to meet them.  So in this engineer’s humble opinion, our HFC network truly is “The Winning Network”, and will keep this industry in good stead for many, many years to come.