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Alan Weissberger

Viodi View – 09/19/14

The best part of conferences are the face-to-face meetings. Next week’s NTCA Fall Conference will provide ample opportunities to meet with Viodi View readers and viewers. One operator I am looking  forward to meeting with is Paul Bunyan Communications. PBC’s had a blockbuster announcement yesterday about their all-fiber, GigaZone offering, which provides symmetric Gigabit speeds at an affordable price (1 Gig for $100) throughout their very rural, 5,000 square mile service territory. Stay tuned to learn more about the GigaZone offering.


Competing on a Two-Way Basis

Ken Pyle interviews Jeff Leslie at the 2014 Metaswitch Forum.
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For those operators in the NECA pool, it has been challenging to take advantage of the competitive advantage of the symmetric bandwidth of a fiber network and price services accordingly. Jeff Leslie of ITS Fiber and ITS Telecom, a last-mile provider of broadband and data center services in south central Florida, explains the importance of the just enacted modification to NECA Tariff #5 that will allow rural carriers to competitively price symmetric services on their fiber to the home networks.

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Budgeting and Accounting Are Cool

Expected revenue decrease over 10 years by attendees at the 2014 NTCA Finance and Accounting conference.
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The rolling budget as a way to help an organization be more nimble and react to changing times is discussed in the above interview with Camille Christiansen and Ira Taylor of the accounting firm of Moss Adams. They had just given a very interactive presentation at the 2014 NTCA Finance and Accounting meeting on the importance of and techniques for effective budgeting. Christensen and Taylor polled attendees regarding the revenue outlook over the next 10 years and 81% expect their organizations to face a decline.

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AT&T’s “SDN-WAN” as the Network to Access & Deliver Cloud Services by Alan Weissberger

An image of a cloud as a metaphor for SDN.
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Being nimble and meeting the marketplace needs is at the heart of AT&T’s announcement this week about its Software Defined Network WAN offering. Alan Weissberger digs into this announcement and its implications in the following article. As Weissberger writes, “AT&T is attempting to position its “SDN WANenhanced IP-MPLS VPN as the unified WAN solution for cloud services provided by its partners.”

Click here to read Weissberger’s article on AT&T’s major announcement.


2014 Hot Interconnects: Hardware for Software Defined Networks & NFV – Part II. by Alan Weissberger

Operator SDN and NFV timeline, according to Infonetics.
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This closing Hot Interconnects session on  Hardware for Software Defined Networks (SDN) & Network Function Virtualization (NFV) was very informative. It revealed very interesting carrier market research and raised quite a few questions/ open issues related to dedicated network hardware to be used in SDN/NFV networks.

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WiFi Bonding Demonstrates Gigabit+ Speeds

Demonstration of 802.11ac at the 2014 Cable Show.
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Barely one month after the FCC’s action releasing more spectrum for WiFi, CableLabs demonstrated how bonding of channels within the new and existing spectrum could yield data rates of more than 1.8 Gb/s. In above video, CableLabs’ Rob Alderfer suggests that there are already some devices on the market that will be able to take advantage of the new spectrum, while AC products with the ability to bond channels are expected to be out later this year.

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Tweets and Short Thoughts


The Korner – Know Your Customer’s Business – Part 2

A collage of Alex Best, Jim Farmer and the iconic 6350 modulator they designed.
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Another show which I look forward to attending, is next week’s SCTE Cable-Tec Expo in Denver. Last year, I had the opportunity to catch up with veteran telecommunications’ engineer and author, Jim Farmer. In the second part of our interview from last year, he explains how his direct customer experience influenced the development of  Scientific Atlanta’s iconic 6350 modulator,

Working with customers has been a hallmark of Farmer’s career, as he made his mark on virtually every aspect of the cable telecommunications infrastructure. When we caught up with him last year at the SCTE 2013, he had just officially retired. As he points out in the interview, he isn’t totally retired, as he is working on a book regarding the practical implementation of Fiber to the Home networks.

He gives what some might consider surprising advice to engineers just graduating from college. Regardless of their path, a young engineer would be wise to follow his sage advice to, “Understand the customer’s business better than the customer understands it.”

Click here to read more and view.

Author Ken Pyle, Managing Editor

By Ken Pyle, Managing Editor

Ken Pyle is Marketing Director for the Broadband Forum. The mission of this 25+-year-old non-profit “is to unlock the potential for new markets and profitable revenue growth by leveraging new technologies and standards in the home, intelligent small business, and multi-user infrastructure of the broadband network.”

He is also co-founder of Viodi, LLC and Managing Editor of the Viodi View, a publication focused on the rural broadband ecosystem, autonomous vehicles, and electric aviation. He has edited and produced numerous multimedia projects for NTCA, US Telecom and Viodi. Pyle is the producer of Viodi’s Local Content Workshop, the Video Production Crash Course at NAB, as well as ViodiTV. He has been intimately involved in Viodi’s consulting projects and has created processes for clients to use for their PPV and VOD operations, as well authored reports on the independent telco market.

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