10G Champ
Mediacom’s Walden Brings
Next-Gen Networks to Life
By Sara Winegardner
The 10G promise sounded like a dream when it was announced at CES in 2019, but Mediacom CTO/SVP, Technology JR Walden is making the technology a reality for customers in West Des Moines, Iowa.
The big announcement of Mediacom’s 10G transition came in February, and Walden and his team have hit the ground running ever since. They expected to be able to make the announcement sooner, but the pandemic slowed everything down. West Des Moines was finally chosen as the company’s 10G testing ground in September, and the first nodes were being placed by November. The operator is taking a rapid node densification approach, so no single node will have more than approximately 100 homes on it. Walden is also having his team ask questions such as can Mediacom conduct preventative maintenance and actively route traffic around problems.
The rollout is still on track to be wrapped up at the end of July, and more 10G markets will be announced at a later date. DOCSIS 4.0 modems aren’t available yet, but once those are available, Walden said customers will immediately be able to feel the difference thanks to the investments Mediacom is already making.
“As soon as those modems become available, we’ll literally be able to plug it into West Des Moines on day one and get substantially more speed out of it,” Walden says. For now, he’s calling the upgrade “DOCSIS 3.1+,” meaning customers will have access to gigabit symmetrical speeds with the capability for so much more. Mediacom is also beta testing speeds of 2 gigabits down/1 gigabit up.
Through the transition, Mediacom is also going to move over to an IP video product. It has been placing IP-capable boxes in customers’ homes since 2013, a strategic decision to prepare them for the day when they may want to turn off RF video. When Mediacom launched the 10G smart home and corresponding network in Ames, Iowa, in 2020, it was the first time the team decided to try to turn off RF video.
“We literally switched everybody from RF to IP overnight, we told nobody. And nobody noticed,” Walden says. “We didn’t send a press release. We didn’t say we went to IP. We literally just changed the channel amps and their boxes all pointed to IP channels, not RF channels. Nobody noticed.”
It’s hard to imagine Mediacom without Walden these days, but without a bet on a dial-up business and a chance meeting with Mediacom founder Rocco Commisso, Walden’s career would have taken a much different turn.
He started in the defense industry, but was inspired to start up his own business when the military began discouraging folks from using early versions of the internet for personal use when on base. “Me and a few friends said, ‘hey, let’s start up an internet dial-up business and then we’ll fill what’s going to be this immediate need,’ including for ourselves frankly,” Walden says. “A little less than a year later, Rocco bought the cable property and in December of 1996, he bought the dial-up business from us.”
Walden stayed on as a contractor, training others on the burgeoning internet business until everything was up and running. But everything changed when he was invited out to the Western Show. He was amazed to see a cable modem on display. He stuck around, and by the early 2000s, Commisso had asked him to run the whole technology division. Walden has now been there for more than 20 years.
Through the decades he’s spent at Mediacom, Walden has never felt stagnant. That’s been the best gift of all, and the primary reason why he hasn’t felt the need to try his hand at another operator or leave the business altogether. “I do really enjoy chasing the shiny new thing and if we run out of shiny new things to chase, I have a problem,” Walden says. “It has surprised me over all these years that we keep coming out with truly innovative new technologies and things that are exciting that we can go implement.”