Complete Story
01/09/2017
How Cable Labs is paving the way for lightning-fast broadband
Phil McKinney’s job as CEO of Cable Labs is to lead the cable TV industry forward into new technologies that can help with the delivery and adoption of cable TV services.
The company is the research arm of the cable TV industry, and its job is to push new technologies such as Docsis 3.1, which enables 10-gigabit-per-second download speeds and 1-gigabit upload speeds for cable TV broadband delivered over coaxial cable. That will change to full duplex, or 10 gigabits-per-second in both directions, over time.
I frequently interviewed McKinney in his previous job, when he was vice president and chief technology officer for Hewlett-Packard’s personal systems group. He was responsible for strategic planning and research and development for HP’s PCs. Now he’s helping to figure out how cable can stay competitive around the world against competitive threats such as 5G wireless, which will bring cable-like speeds to wireless data.
I caught up with McKinney at CES 2017. Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.
