PHANTOM’S FINAL WORD

King of the Hill

Ya know, there are times when a writer panics because he can’t think of a thing to write about. Then there are times there are so many subjects he just can’t get to them all. Changes in TV consumption, the 100th anniversary of broadcasting, response to COVID, what the world will look like after the pandemic, something I’ve forgotten now.  Well, this is one of those too-many-subject times, so we pick and choose.

Maybe this is gloating, or maybe it is just an observation on the strange times we find ourselves in. Those of you who have north of a couple of decades of cable TV under your belts will remember the dawn of the consumer data age, in the mid- to late-’90s. Early consumer Internet access was by dial-up telephone, and boy was it fast! That is, fast if you consider 56 kbps fast (though it started much slower). Well, not quite 56 kbps; that was the advertised downstream speed, but it was a poorly-kept secret that you rarely if ever really went that fast. Then some bright person got the idea of sending data over cable TV. We’d already proven that low-speed data could go over HFC plant (and some pre-HFC coax plant at the time). Some crazy optimists predicted speeds of as much as 1,000 kbps, but no one knew what to do with all that bandwidth; after all, a 56 minus kbps phone circuit could print a whole screen full of characters in just a few seconds, so no demand for more speed.

But the crazy optimists pressed on anyway. CableLabs started a project with the unlikely acronym of DOCSIS – the “Data-Over-Cable Service Interface Specifications,” a mouthful for sure. But they were not alone. The IEEE had a working group in competition with DOCSIS, and our frienemies over at Big Telephone had this DOCSIS-killer called digital subscriber line, DSL. The IEEE group went away fairly fast, and we beat DSL to deployed product by a couple of years. Methinks that the phone guys didn’t take cable TV seriously as a competitor. Boy were they wrong! We had proven that cable plant could pass blindingly fast data by the time DSL arrived at the dance. And it struggled to match our speed. Nonetheless, the Bell-heads insisted that DSL would eventually kill off DOCSIS. But nobody knew what the fuss was about, because who needed more speed anyway?

Now fast-forward a quarter of a century to 2020. The world is locked in a battle with a small irritation called COVID-19 (why is it capitalized?). But almost lost in the noise is an announcement by half of what became of Big Telephone, that they are phasing out DSL. They won’t sell it to any new subscribers, but present subscribers can continue to get it. For now. Some DOCSIS-killer, eh?

But let us not rejoice for too long, boys and girls. Stop and think of what has happened. Big Telephone is over a century old, and has been using their twisted pair medium for that long. It just plain gave out of juice. Technologies do that in a game of leapfrog. One technology is king of the hill until another pushes it off. Then the victor technology is king of the hill for awhile before something else knocks it off said hill. And so on and so forth.

You could look at our HFC technology as knocking twisted pair off the hill, but you’d be making a fatal mistake if you thought that we can stay on the hill forever with what we have. For approaching the hill already is someone to play the next round, trying to knock us off the hill. That someone goes by the name of fiber-to-the-home, or FTTH. It has been embraced more by Big Telephone than by Big (now) Cable, and for good reason: Their technology is obsolete, whereas ours, being newer, has some room in front of it still. So they were forced to change, whereas we can sit relatively still. For now, and only for now. Our time is coming, when HFC will be struggling to retain the hill, and someone else, maybe Big Telephone with FTTH and maybe someone or something else, will be pushing us off. The solution? Grab onto new technology ourselves and use it, along with great customer service (we may need to do some work here, by some accounts), good value for the dollar, and whatever other weapons we can muster, to maintain our position as King of the Hill. Remember, displacement from the hill is a possibility, not an inevitability, so long as we play the game right.

The Phantom
the.phantom@youwontfindmeanywhere.com

You never know when The Phantom is standing right beside you. Sometimes he is in a meeting with you or walking the floor at your favorite cable show. Sometimes he’s hanging with the suits and other times with the front liners. But be assured, The Phantom sees all, The Phantom knows all and, most importantly, The Phantom tells all.

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