Editor’s Letter: Double Down Time?

One friend from college who went on to law school made one of his several marks in the legal profession by creating decision-tree software that helped the insurance industry quantify risks.

Another classmate who was so smart that I had to brace my head for the impact whenever he walked my way became a Ph.D. in econometrics, and then went to Wall Street to run derivatives for a large financial institution.

Not that the lawyer necessarily could have made the economist assess risk more clearly. But it makes you wonder: How many potentially beneficial, cross-industry conversations aren’t happening that should?

Hard to say. One would hope the industry’s strategists are sufficiently multi-disciplinary to engage in worthwhile cross-pollination. But most of us have neither the time nor the brains to venture too far beyond our inbox.

Perhaps someone anticipated these two intersecting trends: the ascendance of policy favoring "net neutrality" and the search for efficient ways and means of delivering IP video to consumers over the HFC network. The industry may have reached the point of needing to double down on high-speed data spectrum: some reserved for managed services and other for the over-the-top providers.

At any rate, the paper presented at April’s Conference on Emerging Technologies by Comcast VPs Jorge Salinger and John Leddy on a next generation access architecture (NGAA) included the illustrative example of a projected channel allocation that included 12 to 20 channels of DOCSIS traffic.

It seemed like an awful lot of channels when I first saw it. But maybe not. Some of that those channels may sooner than later need to be set aside for the net neutrality tax. Did Comcast’s Cavalry charge — congratulations again to the team headquartered in Beaverton, OR — begin in time?

Jonathan Tombes

Editor