CableLabs Hosts Year 2000 Vendor Conference
ableLabs® hosted a two-day vendor symposium in Denver,
Colorado on September 2930, 1998. About 75 representatives from CableLabs'
member companies attended with about 12 key broadband vendors at the Doubletree
Hotel in southeast Denver.
The participating vendors represented the most critical areas affecting the cable industry, including addressable set-top boxes and their controllers; billing services; telephone automated response units (ARU); headend character generation, switching and insertion equipment; emergency alert systems; and automated test equipment. Vendors gave short presentations on their products' Y2K status, and then participated in a group question/answer session.
The meeting was chaired by Patrick Vertovec, director of Year 2000 program office at Jones Intercable, and chairman of CableLabs' Y2K Working Group. This group was actually responsible for the content of the conference, according to Doug Semon, CableLabs' director of network operations. "The working group wanted to arrange some meetings between key vendors and cable operators. The issue was essentially one of interoperability testing," said Semon.
He went on to explain, "For example, the ARU takes the pay-per-view order, passes it on to the billing system for a credit check, and the billing system in turn sends this to the addressable controller. Now, we took on faith that each of these vendors would ensure that their equipment was Y2K-compliant, but we were unsure that they would test the interfaces among the devices, so we planned this conference."
Among the cable operators in attendance, several volunteered their facilities as venues for interoperability testing. For their part, the vendors committed to participate and share information about the results. These results will be posted on CableLabs' Y2K web-site, managed by the Y2K Working Group.
Following the vendor presentations and ensuing discussions, there was an expanded working group meeting. Discussion of future action items for the working group was among the more important topics at this meeting. At the top of this list was the continuation of information and test results sharing, part of the group's original charter.
"We reminded ourselves that the original purpose of the group was to save duplicated effort," Semon recalled. "We have had a very good start with the vendor responses to the RFI on the Y2K web-site, but that doesn't mean that we're done and can go home."
Many conference attendees agreed. Most felt comfortable that the vendors have identified Y2K bugs and have devised solutions, but they also agreed that few, if any, of these solutions actually have been tested in the field. This testing, then, becomes the next step for the working group. In fact, by an almost unanimous show of hands, the Conference attendees felt that another conference, sometime in the Spring of 1999, will be needed to ensure that the cable industry is ready for the Year 2000, a date that we collectively cannot fail to meet. As one conference attendee and working group member put succinctly, "We're determined not to lose any customers to 'satellite' because of this, right?"
CableLabs members may follow the progress of the Y2K effort by checking in at www.cablelabs.com. The Y2K site is in the "members only" section.
