Complete Story
08/16/2017
Cable president talks 'future-proofing' through fiber
➤ MCTV is deploying fiber-to-the-home technology paired with a passive optical network to provide symmetrical download and upload speeds of up to 100 Mbps.
➤ By building a fiber network, MCTV has "future-proofed" itself, its president says.
➤ Regulatory uncertainty remains a top concern, lending weight to calls for a legislative solution to the ongoing net neutrality debate.
When S&P Global Market Intelligence spoke to Robert Gessner — president of MCTV, a midsize operator in Ohio, and chairman of the American Cable Association — a year ago, the top issues of the day were the Federal Communications Commission's proceedings on unlocking the set-top box and privacy. With a new regulatory environment taking shape, Gessner sat down to chat about what the future holds for his company and the cable industry in general. The following is an edited transcript of the conversation.
S&P Global Market Intelligence: What are you most excited about as you look ahead to MCTV's future?
Robert Gessner: I'm very excited about what we're calling our Excellerate project, which is a fiber overlay, a passive optical network being overlain on top of our coaxial system. We look at it as a multiyear project that's going to give us the unlimited capability of a fiber-to-the-home network. We repurposed so many of our people to learn how to design a passive optical network and they did the research to find the best vendors and do the construction and the splicing. They really changed themselves from 20th Century cable guys and gals into 21st Century fiber guys and gals.
If you think about the success of our industry, it has to do with jobs you can't outsource and great service. And that's what our people have done — they've basically future-proofed themselves where they know the system intimately because they built it, they designed it and they know what's good and what its eventual flaws might be.
Why fiber instead of DOCSIS?
When we built our hybrid fiber coaxial plant, we started in 1995, and we completely rebuilt our system. But cable internet didn't exist then, cable modems weren't available then. We designed a system optimized for television with really big nodes. When the internet came along, we were able to successfully split the nodes to make them smaller over these last 20-plus years. But if we went to DOCSIS 3.1, we would have to deploy a lot of new fiber and it was only incrementally more fiber to do fiber to the home. So it will be a little more expensive, but we'll have the benefits of a full fiber-to-the-home network.
We also don't have any debt and we have sufficient cash flow to pay for a fiber-to-the-home network. And our coaxial network is still working great, delivering 100 Mbps no problem, so we figure we can start building our fiber network now. That way we can build it more cost efficiently over the course of time.
