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It's easy to forget that everything in the cable business depends on what goes through the wire. Cable World's Anthony Cru pi tall<s to seven people who have made lasting contributions to what goes through and how it gets there.
It's SCTE week, and since we're a cable industry magazine, we thought we should take a good look at the technical side of the business. Ordinarily, this would involve some reviews of the latest gear, gizmo, geegaw or what have you, a lengthy retrospective on the evolution of the cable tie and, at least in recent years, a boosterish monologue on how the Internet has tried to leave us all behind.
We did not wish to do that.
So we dispatched tech editor Anthony Crupi, known locally as "Croop," on a fishing expedition in search of stories about people who have made a difference in cable telecommunications engineering. He found seven such stories, a good number since it is generally considered lucky by Vegas oddsmakers.
In the following pages, Crupi profiles cable professionals who have achieved above and beyond the norm and in some cases become industry legends. We hope you enjoy the read. -The Editors
Michael Adams
VICE PRESIDENT AND PRINCIPAL NETWORK ARCHITECT, TIME WARNER CABLE
Michael Adams may not be a household name, but he's a bona fide star on Amazon.com. His digital television primer OpenCable Architecture (Cisco Press, 2000) garnered perfect five-star reviews from each customer that wrote in; one Adams fan called the 480 page tome a "real page-turner" and cheered that "Calculus is not a prerequisite!" for enjoyment of the book.
Such an enthusiastic reception for what is essentially a textbook should come as little surprise to anyone familiar with the Time Warner Cable VP and principal network architect's back story.
In summer 1993, the British electronics engineer was working for Northern Telecom's research team, tackling data communications protocols such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM, a network fixed-sized, packet-based technology) and frame relay. Then the phone rang. "I got an interesting call from a headhunter," Adams recollects. "He was looking for someone to work on this thing called Full Service Network which was being done by Time Warner down in Orlando."
The ATM work was, well, ATM work,...