By Jeff Finkelstein, Cox Communications; Tom Cloonan, CommScope; Doug Jones, CableLabs
My most used quote for 2020 so far can be summed up in one of my Bubbie’s (Yiddish for grandmother) favorite sayings, which is as follows: Der Mentsh tracht un Gott lacht. Which is roughly translated as “Man plans and God laughs”.
Despite our plan of intents, plan of records, short-range plans, and long-range plans, the World was caught by surprise with the current events impacting us. We have seen our carefully laid plans cast aside as we have all scrambled to meet user demands resulting from mass isolation to curb the spread of an unseen enemy. For many of us we have experienced 18-24 months of utilization growth in a 3-month window from March to June 2020. Thankfully we are fortunate to have deployed spare capacity and use a data transmission protocol that has handled the new demands very well.
With ubiquitous stay-at-home orders being issued throughout the world in the March and April timeframe, a new era and social experiment had begun. It has created conditions that had never before been witnessed on the planet in the modern era; it would stress many areas of society, including medical resources, human relations, business operations, educational institutions, entertainment and sports, politics and elections, food distribution, travel, supply chains, and much more.
There has been and will be much written about causes and effects of the current World condition. In this paper we will examine learnings we have gathered so far during this unparalleled journey focusing on the cable network and DOCSIS technology in particular.