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Ellis helps decipher the technical language of the cable business
When Leslie Ellis was notified of her upcoming Vanguard Award for Associates and Affiliates, she was stunned. "Someone out there does understand what I do," she says, "which is great because, to tell you the truth, half the time I don't know what to say."
Ellis is joking, of course. After all, as an independent technology analyst, columnist and author, she has covered cable for nearly two decades and has helped countless industry members navigate and interpret this fast-changing, high-tech business, from her "Translation Please" column for B&C sister publication Multichannel News and technology analyses for Communications Engineering & Design (CED ) to her work as a contributing research analyst for Bear Stearns and authorship of The Definitive Guide to Broadband .
But she also relates to her readers' need for someone to demystify complicated concepts and lingo, from Internet Protocol television and distributed CMTS to telco video and session-based encryption. "Sometimes even I get overwhelmed by it," she says. "I'll think, am I stupid? What did that engineer just say? So I understand how someone else could feel that way."
The Doylestown, Pa., native never imagined as a child that she would she grow up prowling the world of cable technologies. "I wanted to be a secretary, like my mother, who was a secretary and court reporter," says Ellis. A computer-science and business degree from Pennsylvania's Shippensburg University was to prepare her for that career, but...