Oregon/
SW Washington
Leading Cavalry’s Charge
(L-r) Mike Mason, Vice President
Technical Operations; Paul
Klein, Senior Director Network
Engineering; Dan Nelson, Senior
Director Operations Management;
Joe Mulder, Senior Director
of Telephony Operations and
Network Dispatch
by Jonathan Tombes, Editor
Plus: Scout, DOCSIS, WiMAX and more
It’s hard to discount the significance of Project Cavalry, Comcast’s two-year, $1 billion analog reclamation project that began in November 2008. The massive
undertaking is a bona fide game changer.
In a May 5, 2009 note, Bernstein Research
Senior Analyst Craig Moffett called it “the
most important capacity expansion project
in Cable’s history.”
It is likewise difficult to dismiss the role
that Comcast Oregon and Southwest Washington (aka Portland) played as the first
region to complete Cavalry. It was a job that
the region’s leaders had eagerly sought. “We
really raised our hand and wanted to go
first,” Curt Henninger, regional SVP said.
Hundreds of thousands of digital terminal adapters (DTAs) and 300 MHz of repurposed spectrum later, in June Portland
became the first Comcast region to com-
plete the project. But it wasn’t their only
accomplishment over the past year. The region also upgraded to DOCSIS 3.0, further
enhanced a network surveillance tool, and
launched Comcast to Go, to name a few.
Extending along Interstate 5 from Long
View, WA to Eugene, OR and encompassing most of the metropolitan Portland and
Vancouver footprint and more than 20
municipalities, this region has caught our
attention in previous years.
They have a reputation for being the first
in with other technologies; their operational metrics repeatedly have won internal
praise; they have leveraged an early jump in
today’s business services market; and their
tech bench is admirably deep. Their role
as the lead ride in Project Cavalry both sets
them apart this year and confirms those
underlying strengths.
Teamwork 101
In fairness, Comcast had reclaimed spectrum pre-Cavalry in Chicago and Detroit.
Other systems under consideration for the
lead position that went to Portland no
doubt could have handled that role. Moreover, all Comcast systems will be expected
to complete their own analog reclamations.
This is a corporate-wide ride.
But Comcast corporate gave the team
headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon, the
chance to prove out the operational template. In learning more about Cavalry and
moreover the Portland team, one sees why
this was a good choice.
Making this spectrum-harvesting exercise work clearly requires the right kind
of technology, especially the low-cost DTA
that enables the delivery of video services
to legacy analog television sets. But it also
