Backtalk

People GFC Names Michel CEO GFC has appointed Peter A. Michel as president and CEO. Michel served as the CEO for Brinks Home Security for 13 years and was the CEO of Penn Central Technical Security Company. Most recently, Michel was CEO of NEP Broadcasting in Pittsburgh . Michel was a seagoing naval officer in the Vietnam War and recently was the chairman of the Homeland Security Advisory Council in Washington , D.C. He has also chaired nonprofit boards and serves on several corporate boards. He holds an M.A. in public administration from the University of Virginia and a B.A. from Colgate University . Allen Joins Arcwave Michael Allen has joined Arcwave as vice president of worldwide sales and support. He will oversee all facets of sales and business development, working closely with top management as a member of the Arcwave executive team. Allen has served in sales leadership roles at ADC Telecommunications, GI/Motorola and NEC America. Allen most recently worked at Performance Systems, and he has also served as vice president of global sales and service for Pacific Broadband Communications. He has also held sales management positions at OnePath Networks, ABL, ADC Telecommunications, General Instrument, Electronic Telecommunications and NEC. S-A Hires Vohra Sandeep Vohra has been named vice president, system architecture and chief technical officer (CTO) for Scientific-Atlanta’s Transmission Networks Systems business. Vohra will have worldwide responsibility for the technology architecture for all S-A transmission products. Vohra’s career spans the military, telco and broadband communications industries. Most recently, he was vice president of business development and product management at C-Cor. Prior to that, Vohra was president, CTO, director and founder of Optinel Systems. Vohra holds a B.S. in physics from Johns Hopkins University and the University of Colorado and a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Colorado . He has been granted more than a dozen U.S. patents and has more than one hundred technical papers published. Tollgrade President Promoted to CEO Tollgrade Communications has promoted President Mark B. Peterson to CEO. He succeeds Chairman and CEO Chris Allison, who retired from both positions, as well as from the company’s board. In addition, the board of directors also announced the appointment of Peterson to the board, and Lead Director Daniel P. Barry was elected chairman of the board. Letters to the Editor Here’s a response to a question posted in CT’s Pipeline ("SLAs: Myth or Reality?"). SLAs Reconsidered The question of the service level agreement (SLA) as a barrier to entry into the commercial services game for cable operators has existed for quite some time. The answer to your question lies somewhere between the extremes of myth and reality. True, the LECs have historically defined and offered SLAs with rigid metrics suitable for the measurement of availability of their infrastructure. Conversely, the cable industry has historically never required similar metrics to support our best effort residential data product. That said, just because we don’t currently measure our network availability in a manner similar to the LECs, that doesn’t mean it’s not there. Some key points on SLAs as cable continues to grow into the commercial services market: Apples to Oranges SLAs—Broadband cable IP technology based on DOCSIS is highly manageable, offering a rich toolkit for the development of SLA metrics. However, the technology behind DOCSIS networks offered by cable is inherently different than technology applied by the LECS. A form of SLA can be defined, but it will look different than those offered by the LECs today. The key will be to convince the commercial services market that our SLA metrics are every bit as meaningful as the LECs.’ The argument that cable IP networks are inherently less reliable than traditional forms of business services access (e.g., T-1) is discounted with each new, satisfied cable modem and EMTA customer deployed. At one time, cable didn’t have the proof points to counter these claims, but we’re now able to demonstrate otherwise. Recall a time, not so long past, when the LECs argued that cable could never deploy telephony service for the same "network reliability" reasons. We’re well beyond that now. I’ve always viewed "five-nines" as a marketing term and not an engineering specification. That said, it’s incumbent upon the cable technical community to respond with standard metrics to build SLAs competitive to those offered by the LECs. Bottom line, the technology is in hand to address the business service SLA issue, but the message needs tuning. Jason Schnitzer
Applied Broadband