ATLANTA – The jab in the headline was meant as a compliment – and directed towards Rogers Cable chief technology officer Dermott O’Carroll.
During a technical session this morning at the National Cable Telecommunications Association annual gathering featuring O’Carroll (facing camera) and the CTOs of Comcast, Cox and Time Warner Cable, session moderator focused on "what’s now, what’s new and what’s next."
When the discussion turned on what the convergence of wireless and cable might be able to do from a practical standpoint, and Time Warner’s Mike LaJoie mentioned security, such as using a broadband connection and a web cam to see who’s at your door on your mobile device, O’Carroll pulled out his Blackberry and said "I can do that now."
To which session moderator and industry consultant/author Leslie Ellis said: "Wow, you are a geek!"
She meant it in the nicest way possible, but the ability O’Carroll has set up for himself was part of a geeky, forward-looking session, which stopped only a few times to bask the telcos and satellite operators.
Besides LaJoie and O’Carroll, the session also featured Comcast’s David Fellows and Cox Communications’ Chris Bowick.
The CTO quartet talked of the deployment of switched video – it’s happening now and will really take off in 2007. "Video on demand is really a precursor to switching," said Fellows. With thousands of hours of video available on demand, he continued, "I think of it as having 6,000 channels."
Time Warner has deployed switched video – where only the channel requested is sent through the system to the consumer, rather than the traditional way of sending all to everyone – in three cities. IN one of them, Columbia, S.C., all 65,000 digital households the video is switched, said LaJoie.
The advantage to MSOs, of course, is recovered bandwidth. If you’re not sending out everything at once, you’ve got room for a lot of other things, like high definition and Internet applications. How much bandwidth is Time Warner saving? "The numbers are very encouraging, said LaJoie. We’re recovering more than 50%."
"Switching is the ultimate answer," added Fellows, saying the technology means unlimited bandwidth.
At Rogers, most of its systems are interconnected so it can’t roll switching out a market at a time. It’s 860 MHz system (the best from Comcast, Cox and Time Warner are all 750) means Rogers has lots of capacity compared to its U.S. counterparts, "and have the luxury of watching and waiting," said O’Carroll.
"But with the amount of HD in our market now, it means we are looking at it," he added. "We’re trying to figure out how well it will scale," since all but Rogers’ Newfoundland system is interconnected. "Hopefully we’ll be launching in the 2007 time frame."
All addressed the recent set top box shortage as well and didn’t blame their suppliers, but themselves. "The demand for HD DVR boxes was so high, it was unexpected across the board," said Bowick.
Rogers experienced the same, added O’Carroll. "Growth in HD is more than any of us had anticipated."
Of the new digital set tops going into the market these days at Comcast, said Fellows, 35% are HD DVRs. Forty-five percent are standard definition digital set tops, 12.5% are HD only and 7.5% are SD DVRs. The others didn’t release such numbers.
What about the latest craze, Slingbox? The box that plugs into the set top and the broadband connection to let people watch TV on their laptops from anywhere there’s a broadband connection? With the many ports on the backs of such set tops, like the disabled Ethernet port, couldn’t cable companies provide the same service on their own?
"Of course," said LaJoie, although he’s not sure such place shifting, which Slingbox provides, is legal. "It’s not a technical issue, it’s a licensing issue," he added.
