Backtalk

Big scissors = Big new digs. Celebrating the grand opening of dB-tronics new headquarters in Inman, S.C., are (l-r) Jay Hope, vice president of dB-tronics, John Poole, president of the Spartanburg Area Chamber of Commerce and Christian Hope, president of dB-tronics. The 55,000-square-foot building features a repair facility, manufacturing plant and offices for the company’s engineering, quality control, sales, marketing and support staff.

Career Moves

Former Charter Communications Senior Vice President of Advanced Technology Tom Jokerst is now CTO at Broadbus Technologies. "Broadbus is poised to deliver a major industry innovation: a VOD server architecture that removes the limitations of streaming data directly off a hard drive, while simultaneously ingesting ‘live’ content," Jokerst says. "This means the system will be capable of addressing an enormous amount of storage directly, eliminating costly content replication and conserving valuable headend/hub space and power."

Optinel Systems, which offers optical transport systems for the cable telecommunications industry, named Jim Kuhns director of network engineering. Formerly, he was with Terayon, where he was the director of field support, responsible for all aspects of field support in the Americas and technical training worldwide.

Quotables

"Among the reasons I switched from satellite back to cable: Satellite services have no local offices, only a headquarters thousands of miles away…Satellite is very susceptible to reception problems due to rain and to ice on the dish. My cable company offers high-speed Internet service and video-on-demand."

— Consumer Reports reader Lawrence Greenberg, West End, N.C.

"Internet users have been crying out for an alternative to broadband."

— dial-up modem vendor U.S. Robotics on its agreement to bundle Propel Software’s Accelerator 3.0 with its modems. The $7.95 a month subscription service uses caching, compression and proprietary connection management techniques to load Web pages up to five times faster.

"MPEG-4 Part 10, a.k.a. H.264, is set to revolutionize the video delivery industry. DVD quality video, at ~1.25 Mbps per stream with full viewer control and interaction capabilities is right around the corner. The delivery mechanism to set-tops, PCs, laptops, PDAs and numerous other Web appliances will not be proprietary systems but rather good old Ethernet and TCP/IP. This change will revolutionize our industry as much or more than satellites and fiber ever did."

— HFCNET’s Max Morales

New Faces on SCTE Board

CommScope’s Tom Maguire, Cox’s Herb Dougall, bright house networks’ Gene White and Cequel III’s Terry Cordova joined three incumbents — Bill Davis, Wayne Hall and Sally Kinsman — as winners in the recent SCTE Board of Directors Election 2003. They took their seats at Cable-Tec Expo in Philly last month.