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Full-Speed Ahead In Iowa's Capital

Mediacom solidified its hold on the farm belt's cable systems, especially in Iowa, in 2001 with a big acquisition from AT&T Broadband. Becoming the major operator in Des Moines and throughout Iowa was a big opportunity for the MSO, but also came with a challenge: Residents in Des Moines and beyond wanted 21st century services, and satellite companies were more than happy to deliver them.

The city of Des Moines, settled by homesteaders in the mid-1800s at the junction of the Des Moines and Raccoon Rivers in south central Iowa, has been trying to shed its image as a corn-belt farm town practically since the American Indians who were known as Mound Builders lived in the region.

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Des Moines has been able to attract a huge insurance industry base; it's known as the third insurance capital of the world, after Hartford, Conn., and London. Despite its location in what some East Coasters call "the flyover zone," the state capital has kept up with trends in technology. Its tech savvy was underscored in December, when the Center for Digital Government awarded Des Moines the first-place prize for midsize cities in its survey on the use of technology by city government.

The city's website says Des Moines has "big city bustle with a small-town atmosphere." It's not quite New York City, but with a metro population approaching half a million, a new Science Center, a young and growing arts festival and a newly approved river-walk project that will bring more people downtown, Des Moines is coming into its own. It's a town where people take care of their own, and where those who leave are often lured back by the promise of single-family homes that cost less than $100,000, on average, and where the typical commute is about 18 minutes.

Like many cable systems in rural or semirural areas, the system in Des Moines had several owners throughout the 1990s. When owned by AT&T Broadband, Des Moines was just a small part of its Great Plains division. In 2001 Mediacom acquired the system from AT&T, part of a larger acquisition of about 800,000 subscribers that doubled Mediacom's size. Des Moines went from being a tiny fish in big pond, so to speak, to being the biggest fish in a small pond, says Steve Purcell, regional VP.

Job No. 1 for Mediacom in Des Moines was to complete the cable network upgrade that AT&T had started but never brought beyond the city limits. Wiring the suburbs for digital and new services was critical: Most of the growth in the metropolitan area was coming from areas outside Des Moines proper. Des Moines' growth was underscored by data from Census 2000: Between 1990 and 2000, the population in the Des Moines metropolitan area increased 16%, to over 456,000. That compares to a population increase of just 5% for Iowa as a whole.

In undertaking the upgrade, Mediacom CEO Rocco Commisso was determined to cut the number of head-ends inherited from the former AT&T systems he had bought. After the acquisition, Mediacom was serving about 319 communities throughout the state of Iowa, and was using approximately 250 head-ends to do so. The sheer number of head-ends not only created a maintenance nightmare, according to Charles King, VP North Central division, it was also an expensive proposition to replace equipment. As the upgrade proceeded to 860 MHz with a fiber overlay, the number of head-ends was reduced to about 15. In the greater Des Moines region, Mediacom interconnected and collapsed 25 headends into one.

"Life becomes simpler and much less expensive and, obviously, because you can spend more time in a head-end the likelihood of having a problem that affects customers for any length of time becomes nil," King says.

The initial plan called for a two-year time frame to complete the upgrade, but it ended up taking 18 months, says regional engineer Don Dettman. Mediacom brought in a core group of engineers from its home office in Middletown, N.Y., to oversee the project. Executives from headquarters also flew in every other week to make sure everyone was on track. Purcell and his group had a huge flowchart that tracked every step of the upgrade, from ordering fiber and electronics, to the direct mailers that were sent out to customers, to tracking the teams of contractors that did the actual work.

"We found that once we got started, the economies of scale and the personnel abilities allowed us to speed it up," Purcell says.

Not only were residents in the outlying communities clamoring for advanced services, there was decided pressure from another area - satellite - which meant Mediacom had to get its digital service up and running throughout the entire Des Moines service area.

To fight off satellite competition, which has picked up now that EchoStar Communications offers local channels (DirecTV also plans to offer the local stations soon), Mediacom has launched a dish buyback campaign that is running from March 1 through the end of this month. The system is offering a $400 credit over a 16-month period, or $25 a month, when satellite customers subscribe to the digital choice package.

Technology Industry

Full-Speed Ahead In Iowa's Capital

Cable World, April 21, 2003

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