When you’re blazing new trails, it can be enlightening to speak with someone who has trod a similar path.
So my recent chat with Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard, whose innovation of the cable modem catapulted cable from entertainment to communications, was timely – especially given the AI revolution and cable broadband’s migration to new and more powerful broadband infrastructures. We’ll get into that a bit more in a moment.
Rouzbeh’s new book, “The Accidental Network: How a Small Company Sparked a Global Broadband Transformation,” should be required reading for anyone who is building and operating a business, particularly in our industry. It’s a story of inspiration and technical brilliance, to be sure, but also of how courage, determination, and understanding of the market led to a massive change in the cable business.
As an entrepreneurial company, we can relate. Rouzbeh took the long view, architecturally creating a product that would be scalable “for decades to come;” teaching operators about the business implications; and seeding the market to help promote customer awareness of the value of broadband. “We would go to the cable operators, leave them a puppy and four weeks later nobody wanted to give it back,” he said.
What “The Father of the Cable Modem” has wrought, we strive to improve every day. Our own long view and close customer partnerships have taken us from foundational network management, monitoring and monetization tools to the leading position in providing tools that are unlocking the new capabilities of DOCSIS 3.1 and higher. Core tools within our Vantage suite – Vantage PNM and Vantage PMA – are leveraging AI to deliver the proactive network maintenance and profile management application functionality needed to optimize DOCSIS 3.1 and higher performance.
“I take my hat off to you,” Rouzbeh said. “At the time that we started no one knew what AI or artificial intelligence is but we called it ‘network management,’ ‘network monitoring’ ‘network diagnostics,’ ‘network tools.’ Wilt Hildebrand, my friend at Cablevision, said ‘hey, we need to have eyes and ears on the network. We need to predict what’s happening.’”
Network optimization has come a long way since those early days, when operators examined packet loss, the behavior of individual modems, and other metrics to determine the health of the underlying infrastructure. With billions of broadband subscribers across the globe, AI automation is required to detect quickly those issues that can compromise reliability and performance even before they happen, preserving subscriber satisfaction and bottom lines.
“You really cannot operate these systems anymore without these types of visibility,” Rouzbeh said. “Operators understand that OpEx and CapEx can be managed better with this kind of predictability. As time goes on and these tools get more adopted it will really open up a whole new doorway for them. I call it the X-ray to the network.”
Looking ahead, Rouzbeh sees DOCSIS continuing to meet the needs of operators and subscribers for many years to come but singles out two things – multi-vendor interoperability and robust network health – that are needed to assure that outcome.
“If we lose the multiple vendor capability, the cost is going to go up and that’s going to damage our service delivery,” he says. “If the reliability gets compromised, we’re all going to pay the price. Hopefully you guys with the bionic eyes and the AI tools that you guys have put into the system will help the cable operators to extend the profitability and life.”
Thanks, Rouzbeh. We’re delighted to be with you and your baby every step of the way as we head into the broadband future!
You can see my entire interview with Rouzbeh at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ayleI3TEOU.