A Telco Baby Turned True Cable Gal

By Alan Breznick and Nomi Bergman Charlotte Field’s got telco roots, going back to her father’s career at Bell Labs. She established her reputation as a technical whiz at AT&T. But now she’s cable all the way: Field, Comcast’s highest-ranking woman in technology and engineering, has been honored with SCTE and Communications Technology magazine’s Women in Technology Award. A five-year veteran of Comcast and its precursor, AT&T Broadband, Field is largely responsible for building the country’s biggest telecom network, which now serves more than 1.2 million circuit-switched phone customers. The next task for Comcast’s SVP, national communications engineering: expanding that network to deliver voice over Internet protocol service. Technology always has played a big role in Field’s life. A native of New York City, she was raised by a father who was employed as a Bell Labs engineer. Consequently, Field, 49, grew up enthralled with math and science and focused on those two subjects throughout her schooling. She landed her first job at Bell Labs 28 years ago, where she worked with ABC, CBS and NBC on early digital compression. Eventually moving over to AT&T, she spent much of her time developing the first interstitial fiber-optics networks between Boston and Washington, D.C., on the East Coast and San Francisco and Los Angeles on the West Coast.