Media Briefing on Network Management

NCTA hosted a media briefing to address the topic of broadband network management. During the teleconference, Kyle McSlarrow, President & CEO of NCTA, spoke about the important role the cable industry has played in the deployment of broadband in the U.S. He began by discussing how the cable industry transformed the old world of dial-up Internet access in the 1990s by investing over $100 billion in fiber technology to roll out residential high-speed data services.

He continued by noting that cable has embraced and enabled recent Internet technologies and applications, since consumer use of broadband applications has served to drive penetration of high-speed data access. However, since various analyses have shown that 5% of customers are typically utilizing 50-90% of the network's capacity, network management is an engineering challenge for all service providers, McSlarrow noted.

McSlarrow proposed that the proper approach for this issue is to allow technology experts and engineers to take the lead. The private sector can work on developing solutions to maximize efficiency of networks, while proper disclosure is exercised by both service providers and applications providers. We should encourage this experimentation and then the marketplace and the Internet community can judge which solutions work best, McSlarrow said.

MP3 file of NCTA Teleconference on Network Managment (32.1 MB)