REVIEWING THE WORK OF Rogers Communications chief technology officer, Nick Hamilton-Piercy leaves one a little awestruck.
He’s been at the forefront of just about every technological development in the cable industry almost since there was a cable industry. If Nick and his team at Rogers (and before that, Canadian Cablesystems) wasn’t first with something, you can bet they weren’t far behind – and most likely contributed to its development, anyway. 
Hamilton-Piercy (left) seems to be enjoying his semi-retirement from Rogers (which is now going on six years) in a role that lets him be part advisor and part futurist. If you want to know what’s going on – and what’s coming – in cable, Nick’s the go-to-guy.
Cartt.ca caught up with him recently and what follows is an edited transcript of a recent chat with editor and publisher Greg O’Brien on his history in the industry and where he thinks it’s headed.
Greg O’Brien: Now, don’t date yourself if you don’t want, but how long have you been in the industry?
Nick Hamilton-Piercy: The telecommunications industry? More than 50 years.
GOB: You began in England in telecom, right?
NHP: Yes. I started in my mid-teens, but really, I was using electronics and telecom since about age eight actually. I used to build old radios and that’s what got me hooked.
GOB: Sounds like an engineer to me.
NHP: In my teens I did the English apprenticeship scheme where you spend five years with a company, which at that time was Marconi. Following that I went for a year with a consulting company doing prototypes on consignment for big electronic companies. That was mostly automation where the apprenticeship was on military electronics. Then I came to Canada.
GOB: What brought you here?
NHP: England was having its troubles at the time. There were a lot of union strikes at the time – the railroad, electric system – everything was just upset then and I just wanted to be out of there. So, I came over here as a bachelor to begin a new life here.
GOB: And how did you end up in cable?
NHP: For 12 years I was with Marconi in Montreal, where I was managing a department in radio and RF engineering, and microwave, and in the process of that, I learned a little bit about cable because we were doing some microwave work under contract for a company (that) was trying to get microwave to these crazy companies called cable companies.
And, at that time they suggested I get to know more about cable and talk to this guy named Ted Rogers in Toronto who was interested in trying to use microwave, too.
GOB: What year would that have been?
NHP: About 1970. At that time, I still didn’t have that much desire to want to go to cable. They seemed like a crazy bunch of folks.
But, then my brother in law (Ken Hancock) joined the Canadian Cable Television Association and was their chief of technology or whatever they called it at the time – and there was this fellow by the name of Jarmain (Ed Jarmain was the founder of Canadian Cablesystems Ltd. of London, Ont., the largest cable company at the time) who was looking for a director of engineering at the time and he asked my brother in law if he knew anyone and said "why don’t you try Nick?"
So, in 1974, I went to London Ontario, met with Ed Jarmain, one of the prime founders of cable in Canada.
GOB: He’s still around, too, isn’t he?
NHP: Yes. He’s 96, I believe.
And once I started speaking to Ed and realized the vision he had, there was no way I could not join him. He was just the perfect gentleman, the perfect visionary.
GOB: I met him and interviewed him once years ago at his home in London. He was into his 90s then and still very sharp.
NHP: He’s a phenomenal fellow. My wife and I went to visit him last year to chat… I thought that if at that age I could be half as good, I’d be happy.
So, I joined Canadian Cablesystems, which at that time was the biggest Canadian cable company… That was in the early 1970s when fibre optics was being discussed as a concept – and Mr. Jarmain very much believed that was a way of getting cable out into the distant communities so we formed a consortium called Broadband Network. Rogers and Maclean-Hunter were in that consortium, as was Premier Cablevision, and we decided to build an experimental fibre optic link (in 1979).
We built it in London, a super trunk between the headend and the system office and not only was it a fibre optic link – it was a digital fibre optic link, which was way ahead of its time.
GOB: That would have been the first in North America, right?
NHP: I think it was – certainly it was the first digital one in North America at that speed. We were using 320 Mbps per fibre or something like that. And, it was bi-directional as well. It operated in conjunction with the latest state-of-the-art coaxial supertrunk to see how the two compared. Indeed, the fibre worked very well and the operation was certainly successful, but the patient died because it was far too expensive to use that technology at that time. We were a bit too early, but it did show us the potential of fibre, which was important.
Round about that same time, Canadian Cablesystems decided to go into the U.S. initially on its own. The city of Syracuse was the first franchise we went for and the core technology to win that franchise was a true, operating two-way system and we managed to develop such a service and actually demonstrate it and launch it.
That was also the time that Ted Rogers decided an acquisition of Canadian Cablesystems would certainly help him grow his empire, but his company wasn’t particularly known then for doing too much R&D while (CCL) was – and a lot of us spoke against it saying "if Rogers buys us, it’ll destroy things.
We had a long CRTC hearing and people said some nasty things about Ted, however Ted still appreciated and respected the people who were there and we all got hired and I was made VP of engineering, which was quite flattering considering what we had always said about Ted.
GOB: But after that, the company grew into one with a reputation of being a cable R&D leader.
NHP: In fact, Ted said two things; a) he believes that R&D is important. And b) to get the purchase done, he made a commitment to the CRTC to put a certain percentage of revenue into R&D. So between the two, it made sense to Ted – and also it was winning us U.S. franchises. So, he gave us all the support you could ever want – and we did a lot of firsts.
GOB: Rogers was a significant U.S. player for quite a while, too, before the company got into telephony.
NHP: And, we had the most advanced systems at the time.
Then, in the 1980s, Rogers had aspirations to get into the cellular area with some partners, and I helped get the license. Management at the company said initially that "you really don’t want to get into (wireless). This is really not our forte." But Ted said, "No. I know this is going to go somewhere," so initially, he made his own commitment, with his own family funds, but within months, management came to realize that wireless was something really worth having.
So, we started building that and the demands of building a cellular system here far exceeded what we could do in the U.S. so it made more sense to depart the U.S. and focus on building our Canadian assets.
GOB: What happened next with the cable network?
NHP: In the early 80s, we moved from analog tuner type set tops to descramblers and we were the first to use baseband descramblers, which were from Zenith. And, working with them we made a two-way interactive version of that to enable impulse pay-per-view.
In the early 1990s, we moved into digital and to start with worked with General Instrument’s DigiCypher 1 but it didn’t make sense to launch that particular product… With digital cable though, we asked: Why go to 64 QAM, which only allows you to 27 Mbps, when we can go to 256 QAM, which allows you to go up to 38-plus Mbps. Everyone said it can’t be done, but we worked on experiments with General Instruments (now Motorola) and did trials at 256 QAM and it worked well and we launched Rogers Digital with 256 QAM.
And, that’s what initially pushed us to the Scientific-Atlanta product rather than the Motorola product.
Then in the late 1980s and early 90s, we knew that extra capacity was needed for the new services coming along. The concept of Internet over cable wasn’t called Internet then, it was called data over cable (the DOC in DOCSIS), which we already established in Portland Oregon, and then we started to see how we could do it in Canada.
GOB: What applications was the network used for then?
NHP: In Portland, it was used as more of a local, rather than national service and linked things together such as car wash stations so that people could see if the soap needed replacing or something – more along the lines of business applications.
When we came to Canada, we put a number of IBM employees on an experimental system in the Newmarket area and after that, we launched The Wave, which was the first residential commercial use of (delivering the Internet).
But, to do that effectively, you had to have true, two-way systems. So that meant we had to look at our whole architecture and make them much more resilient and also find ways of cutting the cascade of amplifiers. Fibre was the obvious way to go about doing that. We then introduced in the early 90s, the concept of the fibre backbone and the fibre ring, to give resilience (for which Nick won an NCTA technology Vanguard award).
By the late 90s, we began thinking about video on demand. We had our first foray into video on demand in the early 1990s with Microsoft, where they had a program called Tiger. But, we didn’t actually implement that because of the amount of software and costs surrounding it defeated any business rationale.
But in the late 1990s, it became reality and we put together business proposals which were accepted by the board of directors and that was the start of Rogers VOD system.
In 2000, I went into partial retirement, which was an unusual step. I was going into total retirement but at the time (Rogers Cable CEO) John Tory refused to accept it! So that gave me this current role of a part time employee and mentor/advisor and a little bit of a futurist.
GOB: Are you happy with it?
NHP: Yeah. It’s fun. It let’s me do what I love to do, which is to say, ‘this is what’s coming along, how can we get there?"
GOB: Looking back, what would you say were or are the most important technologies?
NHP: Linear push-pull amplifiers. Those were very important because we wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near the multiple channels we have now without that. Set top converters. Descramblers for pay TV. AML Microwave, even though we don’t use much of it now. And, fibre optics.
Then, the next most-important one is Internet protocol, which allowed us to get into data services. And at the same time, digital video compression.
Those are what I would call the highlight technologies because without those we’d never be where we are today.
GOB: Are there any technological advancements or applications where you thought would be great but in the end, went nowhere?
NHP: Probably Teledon. It was a government-sponsored program to get information retrieval to the masses – a technology that gave you graphics and text on your TV through a special adaptor. I thought it was going to be the bees knees, but it was overtaken by the Internet. By the time that technology was developed, the Internet had taken off.
GOB: Has there been any technology that surprised you?
NHP: Digital compression did more than I ever dreamed possible.
GOB: The fact that it seems to be ever more compressible?
NHP: Yes. First there was MPEG-1 then MPEG-2 now MPEG-4… basically the idea that you could get a bunch of TV channels into a 6 MHz slot when the original thinking was you couldn’t squeeze more than one channel per slot and here we are squeezing 10 or 12 channels in a slot.
GOB: Looking to 2006, what’s on the immediate horizon for cable and telecom?
NHP: I think the fixed-mobile convergence is probably the number one thing that’s happening – and the next is wireless distribution of video, initially through the cell phone but later on through a more appropriate appliance like a video iPod or whatever that may be.
I think that everyone is looking at those as the next thing. However, it’s hard to know if people will truly want video as they’re moving along at 100 kilometres an hour or if they want place-shifting – where you want video anywhere, but not necessarily on the move.
Another thing that is very important – but it means more acronyms – is IMS, integrated multimedia service, which is coming through the cable side and the cellular side. That technology will integrate these services so you have multimedia on any platform. That’s the sort of magic glue. You’ll start seeing that. A lot of people say they’ve got it now and you’ll see press releases saying they’ve got end-to-end solutions but right now it’s very overreached. It’s ‘presentware’ at the moment but it is coming.
The other thing you’ll see emerging is the concept of switched broadcast. That will be initially done to reclaim bandwidth in the existing cable systems but eventually it will allow us to migrate from our regular MPEG-delivered digital TV to IPTV. Last year there were trials, this year you’ll start seeing implementation.
GOB: Farther than 2006, what do you see? When will IPTV come to cable?
NHP: It is going to start showing a little bit in 2006. For the telephone companies, it’s the only way for them to do it, practically. Cable doesn’t need to do it but it will migrate in that direction because of economics and flexibility. I think you’ll start to see that in three to five years in cable.
The other thing coming along is MPEG-4, which is very important to the telephone companies because if they’re going to squeeze HD, or even multiple SD channels through that copper wire, you’ve really got to go to that more efficient compression… you can get HD at 19 Mbps with MPEG-2 and about 10 Mbps of comparable quality in MPEG-4, but the aim is to get that 10 down to 5 or 6 megabits.
Cable companies won’t have a mass conversion to it because of incompatibility to the existing base, but with HD on demand, that might well be the only way to do it. It’s to expensive to do HD on demand with MPEG-2 – it just uses too much bandwidth.
