NEW ORLEANS – The technical leaders of the North American cable industry gathered in room 211 at the Ernest Morial Convention Center in New Orleans today to give one of the industry’s true engineering pioneers a retirement send-off.
Rogers Communications Nick Hamilton-Piercy is officially retiring after over a half-century in cable and telecommunications, most of that with Rogers. “I was hoping just to slip off unnoticed,” he said this afternoon, visibly surprised by the planned get-together put together by NCTA staff.
Hamilton-Piercy has been one of the titans of the technical and engineering side of the cable industry, notably leading the first team to build and operate a digital fibre optic trunk link in the late 1970s in London, Ont.
He came to Canada from England in the 1960s to work for Marconi, then later joined Ed Jar main’s Canadian Cablesystems Ltd. where he began his pioneering work on fibre optics. When Rogers purchased CCL in 1979, Hamilton-Piercy and his technical team was brought aboard. At Rogers, he ended up as chief technical officer, a position he retired from in 2000.
He has served on so many boards and committees with the NCTA, SCTE, IEEE, and CCTA and written so many thousands of words from magazine articles and technical papers that mentioning them all would take ages.
Now, at age 70, he is stepping down completely after serving as something of a mentor/futurist in an advisory role at Rogers since his retirement about eight years ago.
Cartt.ca has had the pleasure of featuring Nick’s writing on several occasions and we profiled Nick in 2006. Click here to read that piece.
Bill Check, the NCTA’s senior vice-president of science and technology led a big group of the cable industry’s most senior folks – including Time Warner Cable’s CTO Mike LaJoie – in a tribute to Hamilton-Piercy after he finished leading a technical session on mobile video Tuesday afternoon.
Check also read a letter from Comcast CTO Tony Werner, whom Hamilton-Piercy had hired to work at Rogers Cable in the 1980s, when the Toronto-based cable company was growing rapidly on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border.
Werner called Hamilton-Piercy’s career: “The gold standard for the rest of us to try to follow… a visionary and leader throughout the industry,” read Check of Werner’s letter.
“His leadership in fibre topology and early architectures extended past the boundaries of Rogers to companies around the globe,” added Werner.
– Greg O’Brien
