Engineering Essence of Cable-Tec Expo

The annual SCTE event known as Cable-Tec Expo® offers its exhibitors and attendees so much good stuff to catch and so much to get caught up in. SCTE’s Cable-Tec Expo is about browsing the exhibit floor and weighing the merits of well-polished product presentations. It’s about a well-choreographed awards luncheon that casts the spotlight on the industry’s pioneers and pacesetters. It’s about a bevy of networking opportunities-including Expo Evening -where you can meet new people and write another chapter in a longstanding friendship. Indeed, Cable-Tec Expo is all of these essential things that quickly come to mind. But increasingly, the Expo experience is being defined by what goes on in the giant meeting rooms that typically surround the convention center’s exhibit floor. There you’ll find the Expo workshops, conducted by the brightest minds in our engineering community. It’s there that you can focus on such bread-and-butter technical issues as: I’ve listed above the broad categories of Expo 2004’s 20 workshops. Each workshop will be offered twice. The specific topics will focus on today’s burning issues, such as WiFi, VoIP, DOCSIS�, HDTV, network architecture, multiservice transport issues, headend infrastructure, cable modems, wireless data, all-digital migration, PacketCable^TM, OSS and more. Above all, Cable-Tec Expo is about helping you develop as a technical professional. What better way than with a full slate of hard-hitting workshops? I’ve had the privilege as chair of this year’s Expo Program Subcommittee to help select and structure the subject matter that my subcommittee colleagues and I trust most clearly defines the current engineering course of our industry. This year’s Expo Call for Papers yielded the most submissions ever for an SCTE event-more than 170. Our subcommittee chose the top 40 entries around which to build 20 workshops. Like a tall, ice-cold glass of Florida orange juice, we’re out to satisfy a powerful thirst, a thirst for knowledge that can make our technical personnel better achievers in a dynamic workplace. We want these workshops to meet the needs of the Cable-Tec Expo attendee like never before. In doing so, Expo’s workshops will continue to raise the professional development value of the overall Expo experience. We’ll know we’ve succeeded if the meeting rooms are packed and we’re hitting up the convention center concierge for extra chairs. Thanks to everyone on the 2004 Expo Program Subcommittee: Scott Cooley, Insight Communications; Terry Cordova, Cequel III; Patrick Harshman, Harmonic; Joe Matarese, nCUBE; Lenny Melamedas, SPATIALinfo; Marv Nelson, SCTE; Jim O’Leary, Cisco Systems; Daniel G. Parenteau, Cox Communications; Larry Richards, C-COR; Jeff Shearer, Adelphia Communications; Joel Welch, SCTE; and Richard White, Time Warner. Join us for Cable-Tec Expo 2004 in Orlando, June 15-18. Take in the workshops of your choice. Get all the Expo news-including the workshop agenda and specific descriptions-at expo.scte.org. See you in sunny Orlando. Steve Silva is executive vice president, business development, Comcast Cable Communications.