The SCTE held its annual conference and exhibition at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, September 24-26. It ended just as Hurricane Helene was slamming into Florida.

That leads to a preliminary lesson: Check the weather. I hadn’t been following the news. It was only through exhibitors on the floor who were already talking on Day 2 about packing up that I realized Atlanta was in Helene’s path. We were lucky. I left midday on Day 3, taking MARTA to Hartsfield Airport. One step ahead of this monstrous storm that hit western North Carolina so hard.

Top Five TechExpo Impressions

Having previously covered this event for many years as a trade journal editor, I know you can’t capture it in one take. Instead of a Show Daily summary or wrap-up, I’ll just offer a few quick thoughts:

Name Change. The cable industry has certainly evolved. Over the years, it added telephony, data, digital video, business services, wireless voice, streaming video and more to what was once its only service: analog video. As Liberty President and CEO Mike Fries noted at last year’s gathering in Denver, 70 percent of current revenue comes from services that didn’t exist when he joined the industry in the 1980s. As if to ratify this evolution, the SCTE has changed the event’s name. Cable-Tec Expo is no more. Long Live TechExpo! (Drop a word, gain a letter – “h” in this case.) Notable, but not a biggie. Many insiders are used to simply calling it Expo, anyway.

Fixed Wireless? President and CEO of Liberty Latin America Balan Nair said some interesting things about fixed wireless in his interview with CableLabs President and CEO Phil McKinney. First, he pointed out the distinction between fixed wireless that shares an operator’s mobility spectrum and another type with its own dedicated spectrum. “We’ve been focused on the fixed wireless on the separate spectrum, not using up our mobility spectrum,” Nair said. What’s eye-opening is that Liberty Latin America is looking at this not as a competitive threat, which is how fixed wireless is regarded in North America, but as an opportunistic service offering. New technologies have made fixed wireless very much a viable business proposition, even in the 5-6 GHz range, he said.

Industry Bifurcation. Consolidation has been happening for decades, but now it just seems hard-wired into two camps. In the U.S., there’s Comcast and Charter, and everyone else. In terms of DOCSIS 4.0, we’re split between those deploying Full Duplex DOCSIS (FDX), namely: Comcast. Then there’s Charter, which is opting for Extended Spectrum DOCSIS (ESD), and all the other operators who are either considering ESD or just sticking with DOCSIS 3.1 for now. One big news item in Atlanta was that Broadcom, Charter and Comcast are making a unified DOCSIS 4.0 chipset (incorporating FDX and ESD) available to all interested parties, rather than requiring them to sign a joint development agreement (JDA) with Broadcom. We’ll see in time how much unity extends beyond that press release. It’s all a far cry from SCTE standards subcommittee work or any kind of CableLabs-hosted consensus.

Comcast Rules. Comcast is the biggest MSO in town, no denying that. It also has many of the industry’s best engineers. There was Comcast Fellow Dr. Robert Howald, giving another keynote at a Light Reading breakfast. Comcast Cable EVP and Chief Network Officer Elad Nafshi sharing the latest on DOCSIS 4.0 deployments. And other Comcast presenters, especially VP Access Technology and Systems Engineering (and former CableLabs CTO) Belal Hamzeh, co-author of six technical papers! (To find them, visit the TechExpo documents site, enter the year and author name.) Comcast is driving much of the industry; so you need to hear what they have to say.

Missing Rex. I first met Rex Porter in early 2000, on a snowy evening in Exton Pennsylvania, soon after joining Communications Technology. At the time, he was the magazine’s Editor in Chief. (Here’s an oral-history interview with Rex from about that time.) Health reasons kept Rex from attending the last few Expos, and 12 days before this one opened, he passed away. I visited with his son Jeff on the show floor and stopped by the Day 2 evening gathering of the Loyal Order of the 704 – the society of industry tech ops veterans that annually pays homage to the Jerrold Model 704 field strength meter – and pink flamingos. Rex had been the spiritual leader of this whimsical and renegade outfit. His wit and wisdom touched many. He will be missed.