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
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
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
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 WAN” enhanced 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
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
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
- Biweekly round-up of articles on the autonomous vehicles that caught grabbed our attention and elicited a comment.
- The secret sauce
#Automattic uses to eliminate efficiency destroying business interuptions – P2 microblogging - It will be interesting to see how Microsoft might be able to leverage its other products, such as Skype, to provide more value to Minecraft (e.g. Skype features of real-time voice and text interactivity integrated into Minecraft).
- Important article correcting errors in
#intel#trinity book by the person who was there. - What’s interesting is the use of Google Apps on iOS devices, such as at my son’s high school. An indication of how well Google is makings Google Apps part of the fabric of the everyday life of tomorrows’ consumers.
The Korner – Know Your Customer’s Business – Part 2
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.”
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