McKinney Seeks ‘Bold’ CableLabs, as Member CEOs Want Developments Speeded up
CableLabs, with member CEOs seeking faster development, should be “bold” in the technological ideas it explores and helps brings to fruition, CEO Phil McKinney said. McKinney, who took over from Paul Liao in June, said his mantra is pursuing “BHAGs": Bold, hairy, audacious goals. “Two or three of those BHAGs” can “really lift the entire industry,” he said in a videotaped interview on C-SPAN that was to have been shown this weekend. Cable BHAGs include the transition to all-Internet Protocol networks, an “explosion of devices” and making network technology “transform” to be “open to” such as range of devices, he said.
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There are some challenges for an industry of cable’s size to quickly seize new technologies and deploy them in operators’ systems, though also advantages to cable’s aptitude for organizing versus the ability of Silicon Valley that’s comprised of far more companies that are less cohesive, McKinney said. He cited his past job as Hewlett-Packard chief technology officer in dealing with smaller companies. “The challenge” for cable operators is “you've got to think of it on that size and scale,” of serving a very high percentage of homes systems pass, McKinney said. “Scale can sometimes cause you to move a little bit slower than if you were a new startup bringing in a new technology."
The cable CEOs on CableLabs’ board “have clearly tasked me with ... picking up the pace” at the organization, McKinney said. That might mean the industry moves more quickly from an “early stage, the beginning of that new idea” to fruition, he said. Cable has the unique ability among all other industries he’s worked with “to get things done fast, in some form of a cohesive way,” McKinney said: That’s unlike in the Valley, where “you have all of these little companies competing against each other."
The coming DOCSIS 3.1 specification from CableLabs “allows the cable operator to take advantage of the capacity they've already invested in,” McKinney said on The Communicators in an interview recorded last month at CES in Las Vegas and available online (http://cs.pn/YwmxR8). Operators will go from the 100 Mbps maximum download speeds widely available to “next” 300 Mbps and then 10 Gbps, he said. He noted that DOCSIS 3.1 could support uploads of 1 Gbps (CD Oct 22 p6). “Higher capacity, better technologies on the network side” are “bringing you more capacity,” as will be borne out in coming years, he said. The broadband usage at cable operators has been growing at a compound annual growth rate of 30-50 percent in the U.S., “and there’s no slowing down,” he said. Meanwhile, capital spending by operators in China is forecast to be $30 billion over the next five years, McKinney said.
McKinney sees cable operators’ Wi-Fi interconnections growing to become more of a nationwide service, to meet consumer demand for such data consumption outside their home networks, he said. Wireless is “a growing interest of the cable industry,” as demonstrated at NCTA’s annual show last year in Boston where the top-six operators disclosed the interconnection plan. A possible goal is “to eventually be able to use that nationwide,” he said. On the TVEverywhere product for pay-TV subscribers to stream channels part of their wireline video package online, “the industry is moving, slower maybe than some people want, but it’s getting there,” McKinney said. He cited products like HBO Go.