Road Runner exec Jay Vaughan has joined PCT International as its chief technical officer. Vaughan spent 15 years with Time Warner Cable, most recently as vice president of technical operations within Road Runner. Letter to the Editor Dear Editor, We would like to express our disappointment regarding the article “Next-Gen CMTSs: Putting Them to Test” by Francis Edgington of Edgington Engineering published in your August issue. We believe that the test results are inaccurate and in no way reflect the performance of our current shipping product. Your readers should know that the author conducted his tests on unknown hardware without ADC configuration recommendations. Because Cisco sponsored the test, one might expect that it provided the author with its latest hardware and software revisions. ADC, and possibly the other CMTS vendors, were not afforded this courtesy. ADC contacted Edgington Engineering at the end of July and offered to contract with the company to re-run the tests using the latest ADC software, hardware and with the benefit of ADC configuration recommendations. Unfortunately, Edgington Engineering replied that the system and lab might no longer be available for testing. Because the results published in the article were far from the results we see in the field with over 800 installed systems, ADC reconstructed the Edgington tests as closely as possible based on the descriptions in the article. The ADC results in the following chart are ranked from best (1) to worst (5) and are compared to the “Type 1” CMTS results as published in your August issue. ADC is willing to work with any independent lab or consultant, including Edgington, to reproduce these tests using current ADC hardware and software. —Hilton Nicholson
President, ADC IP Cable Business Unit *Denotes a virtual tie.
The Arris and Motorola rankings are based on the Edgington results; ADC does not stand by these results. Editor’s Reply: Communications Technology contacted Francis Edgington with ADC’s comments. His reply follows below: “All CMTSs tested for the article were of the same age (less than 18 months), and purchased directly from the manufacturers as new. There were no engineering specials or prototypes in the test. The ADC line card tested had been replaced under warranty by ADC after July 15, 2002. The ADC software version tested was CMTS 3.1.58, February 2003. All CMTSs used publicly released software dated between January 15, 2003, and March 23, 2003. No hidden commands or vendor-specific tinkering was permitted to any configuration on any CMTS. I spoke with ADC’s Hal Roberts about the test configuration so he could replicate my tests. He indicated that his test configuration used a vector signal analyzer, while mine used a spectrum analyzer. Depending on VSA configuration, this could result in a lack of correlation between the measurement results. Regardless of who sponsored the tests, I was comfortable that every effort was made to provide fair, unbiased, and accurate results. There was no attempt to penalize any one vendor over another. This is merely a snapshot in time of performance on the equipment available, and is representative of equipment currently deployed in the field.” —Francis Edgington
President, Edgington Engineering

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