PROVIDING ANY KIND OF technology to cable and telecom companies these days isn’t easy. 
You have to be nimble. You must be prepared for change. Always. So many new services being provided by the MSOs. So many changes to the networks. It helps, says Cableserv president Audley Alexander (right), to have been a part of so many transformations in his 32-plus years in the cable industry.
An electrical engineer, Alexander joined Maclean-Hunter Cable in 1973 and stayed with the company through its purchase by Rogers. He stayed until 1999 when he left for amplifier company Cableserv. All cable technicians and engineers know amplifiers inside and out. Can’t have a network without a bunch of them working properly – but the way they’re deployed now is far different than their legacy use.
What follows is an edited transcript between Cableserv president Audley Alexander and www.cartt.ca editor and publisher Greg O’Brien.
Greg O’Brien: You’ve seen quite a bit in the industry.
Audley Alexander: Definitely.
GOB: What was cable all about when you started in 1973?
AA: In 1973, a lot of the cable systems were being rebuilt to, believe it or not, launch their mid-band services. At that time, converters were just coming in and subsequent to that, decoders came in. So… especially between converters and decoders, we’ve certainly come a long way.
GOB: What would have been the bandwidth of a cable system back then?
AA: Some of the advanced ones were 550 (MHz) systems. The system I was involved in, in London Ont., was 550.
GOB: That’s where the beginnings of the cable in Canada comes from.
AA: Yes, definitely. Started in London – Harry Anderson and Ed Jarmain, although there’s still come argument about who started first – in the early ’50s. The reason for that is it was just natural because it was a significant fringe area between Erie, Detroit and Buffalo. You could get lots of channels (over the air) but none of them were very good (in terms of reception).
GOB: I worked a little farther down the highway in Tilbury for a while and you could really see the overlap in TV signals there. Sometimes you’d get Detroit, sometimes Cleveland…
AA: Exactly. You’ve got too much of everything and not enough of anything.
GOB: So, when working in cable in the 1970s, what was the first “big” change in technology then that you saw?
AA: For me personally, the first big change was replacing the equipment that had been there for the prior 15 to 20 years. Really, it was the rebuilding of the original infrastructure. And, it was much different than it is now. Fibre optic technology wasn’t prominent then. Around that time Rogers was doing some experimenting with a fibre optic link and it was a major breakthrough at the time (early 1970s).
A rebuild then consisted of replacing your coax cable, your taps and your drops, with electronics – and a lot of that equipment is still in place today operating at 860 MHz.
GOB: Moving into the ’80s where there are a growing number of TV channels, how many rebuilds were you involved in?
AA: Quite a number actually, because after the cable replacement, the other rebuilds were electronics replacements… the amplifiers, when we went to 750 from 550. In a lot of cases, we didn’t have to replace the cables again, it involved re-spacing of the electronics.
Also, at the time, Bell Canada had owned all of the facilities, except for the electronics. So, we had to lease the facilities and funny enough, you had to get permission to do some kinds of work on the system. So, it was an odd situation because we paid for the capital expenditures to put it in and then had to lease it back. It was a win-win for Bell Canada.
GOB: Now, as cable moved towards digital and the Internet, what were the main challenges you faced on the technical side?
AA: The challenge was to ensure the networks were up to the capabilities and this is when the hybrid-fibre-coax network really began to come into play because you couldn’t run with those long (amplifier) cascades we had when the bandwidths were lower. My first experience with anything digital was the launch of Internet services and I was fortunate enough in London to have been in on the trials of Internet services long before the launch (which happened in 1995, with the launch of Rogers Wave).
That was pretty exciting. I can remember having the first Internet surf that was beyond 28.8, boy that was exciting.
GOB: And what was available on line then?
AA: Web sites sure weren’t as prevalent. There were a few sites, but I can’t remember using www then. It wasn’t really the World Wide Web. It was basically point-to-point, or you would have service providers that would allow you to share files or download files or get upgrades for programs. It was mainly interaction between computer hobbyists.
GOB: In 1999, when you left Rogers, what was your position?
AA: I was the customer service manager for Rogers in London, which by then had incorporated the Maclean-Hunter properties: London, St. Thomas…
GOB: And you left to come to Cableserv, the amplifier company. How has the amplifier business changed in the six years you’ve been there?
AA: Significantly. First of all, we have better electronics, better hybrids. We’re now using gallium arsenide, gas technology, which offers significant performance improvements over the silicon hybrids that were being used in amplifiers prior to that. When I joined Cableserv, we were doing a project where we were one of the first companies to use gas technology in an amplifier upgrade in a project… in Brockville where the equipment is still operating.
GOB: The cascades in amplifiers have sure changed as the operators go to more things like digital and Internet and now voice.
AA: Right now we’re dealing with cascades that are three or four or five amplifiers and those are considered long nowadays.
GOB: And what was long in the old days.
AA: Could be 30.
GOB: How has the business for Cableserv itself changed in terms of the customers you serve and the jobs you do?
AA: What’s happened is that currently in the U.S., a lot of the systems there are not at the stage the Canadian systems are. Canadian systems were older, more mature, so therefore they were rebuilt earlier, whereas cable in the U.S. (rebuilds came) later.
Now, what’s happened is in some cases, the U.S. launched 750 MHz networks while the Canadian systems were 550 but then because the Canadian systems had to be rebuilt, they leap-frogged them in bandwidth. Consequently, you’ll find that Canadian systems have more bandwidth than in the U.S.
The other thing, too, is that we have something unique in Southwestern Ontario – access to all these (American over-the-air) channels. So, we had the product, whereas in a lot of the U.S. – up until the cable network channels came on like CNN – there wasn’t a lot of different local services. We had a lot of different (American) services.
GOB: Given the way the industry has changed so much, how does a company like Cableserv maintain its market niche?
AA: We target operators that have legacy equipment with bandwidth constraints. That means if we go to a Comcast or a Time Warner or any of those – and most of our business is in the U.S. – they would have networks operating on 550 or 750 and we would allow them to upgrade their bandwidth without replacing their equipment.
Basically, we enhance the bandwidth capabilities of the current equipment and that’s where our cost-effectiveness comes from. If not, of course, you have to go through the construction cost of ripping it out and buying new ones.
The other thing is that as cable operators launch VOIP, then our product starts to evolve into solutions that help customers launch voice over IP. We start dealing with products that facilitate easier access to monitor power supplies, we also manufacture -48 power supplies for legacy products so that the cable operator can install traditional telco-type equipment that has different powering than what they would have had typically in cable. We’re doing that now.
So, our business is changing somewhat.
