ET Award Winners
In addition to David Haigh’s Young Engineer Award (which we covered here last week), three other individual awards were presented at ET: the IP Innovator, Polaris and Star of Integrity Awards. All are restricted to SCTE members. IP Innovator: Greg Griffis, Cox Communications The IP Innovator Award recognizes an engineer or manager at the system, MSO or vendor level who has displayed innovative achievement and creativity in the advancement and development of IP networking.
Griffis is a senior network design engineer focusing on designs for backbone with Cox Business Services and Cox Digital Telephone. He has standardized Diffserve QoS classification schema and the associated behavior aggregate scheduling behaviors across the entire packet-switched Cox footprint. Griffis has engineered, planned, coordinated and sold buy-in for a classification schema to multiple product development houses within Cox, including Digital Video, Cox Business Services, and Cox High-Speed Internet and Voice Technology. Polaris: Charlie D. Elliott, Rogers Cable Communications The Polaris Award recognizes an engineering manager who displays exceptional achievement in the development and/or deployment of HFC networks.
Elliott is vice president of network implementation with Rogers Cable. For 30+ years, he has managed Rogers’ HFC upgrade, rebuild and new build activity. He also pioneered a deep-fiber architecture in green field deployments. Elliott was able to deploy a unique architecture in which a GigE optical link, utilizing in-field optical multiplexing, allowed the addition of nodes in a "daisy chain" mode rather than traditional combining architecture. Star of Integrity: Esteban Sandino, Comcast The Star of Integrity Award recognizes an engineer or manager who has contributed to the efficiency and effectiveness of next-generation networks in delivering on-demand services.
Sandino is director of engineering with Comcast. He was the lead engineer responsible for the design and implementation of on-demand networks that serve more than 5.5 million subscribers in the Comcast’s West Division. He led the design and deployment effort of seven major metro IP video transport networks and the storage, edge and management networks that supported more than 100 million on-demand streams per month over the past year.
The IP Innovator Award is sponsored by Juniper Networks. The Polaris Award is sponsored by CommScope. The Star of Integrity Award is sponsored by ARRIS, formerly C-Cor. These awards are made possible through the efforts of these sponsors, CED magazine and the SCTE.
