SCTE member since 1982 Title : Vice President of Operations Engineering, Charter Communications Broadband Background: Among the other distinguishing highlights of his career, Gorman was one of the first in the United States to operate an FM video fiber interconnect, founded the Chesapeake Chapter of the SCTE in the Baltimore/Washington D.C. area, and co-authored the book RF Signal Leakage. What are your current duties? I am now the vice president of operations engineering for Charter. In this role, I am working on finding and implementing solutions for operational efficiencies within Charter nationwide. What are the biggest challenges that you face in your day-to-day work? Implementing best practices. As in the case of any large decentralized organization, there are best practices that take on many forms. Finding the absolute best, measuring its impact and then scaling it across the corporation is time consuming, not just from the standpoint of the actual "best practice" but also the people component. Changing behavior presents its own challenge. How did you first get involved in cable? I was putting antennas on rooftops in 1972 when I saw a crew lashing cable between telephone poles. I asked my boss what that was. He told me it was to be a master antenna system for the whole city and that they were going to charge people $6.95 to watch everything that could be received by the antenna I was installing. Four years later, I was knocking on their door. I walked in and told them I could put connectors on coax and read a field strength meter. Not a lot of folks walked in off the street with that ability back then. What prompted you to run for the board? Getting involved in the industry is necessary for me. It has done so much for me. The people I have met and worked with over the years, the technology and the challenge of leading in a competitive world are all exciting. This is quite an honor to be on the board. What are your region’s key issues? I am now seeing our issues on a more global scale, but for Charter, our issues are like most: rolling out the right technology at the right time in the right markets. Not all Charter markets will benefit from VoIP or all-digital networks in the foreseeable future, as they are small and rural. Keeping them competitive is a challenge. What do you see as cable’s biggest technology challenges? Making sound decisions on the best way to migrate to all-digital platforms in the face of the telco onslaught, next-gen network architectures, management of bandwidth and winning customer minds. Where is the industry going in the next five years? We may truly get to be converged to the household, in an IP world: voice, video, data all packetized and managed in a switched environment. CPE becomes integrated in video and PC terminals and is no longer bought by the industry, but by the consumer. On-demand is the word for entertainment. What are your plans at Cable-Tec Expo? Looking at workforce management systems, edge gear, CPE, test equipment. What is your favorite cable memory? Sitting in a class every Thursday morning with a person named Bob Cole, a blackboard and a spectrum analyzer (on my own time) and learning cable technology. Installing the first satellite dish in Annapolis Maryland . Being the person who turned HBO, MTV, CNN, ESPN and all those other channels on. No one truly gets the experience of being the first anymore

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