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Cable Runs Through The Land of Adobe

Everyone has a New Mexico slide show in his head, a stuttered progression of postcard imagery that stands in place of any actual empirical knowledge about the Land of Enchantment. Say "New Mexico" and the average American immediately free-associates a panoply of sun-dappled arroyos and Georgia O'Keeffe cow skulls. Those of a more hysteria-minded bent may be given to visions of Gila monsters and mushroom clouds. Adobe, a certain rugged high-desert tan and a whole lot of handcrafted silver jewelry round out the mix.

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Which is not to say that these elements don't truly exist in New Mexico - in fact, most of the above, minus the poisonous lizards and the A-bomb, are a big part of what draws people to the region. But there's a lot more to the state than meets the (mind's) eye.

According to Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class, the kind of artsy, outdoorsy environments fostered in areas like New Mexico actually help spur economic development. When Florida rated Albuquerque, N.M., No. 8 in the country on his creativity index (an aggregate of such factors as workforce tech savvy, innovation and diversity), he was only reinforcing something most of the city's residents have known for years.

"Albuquerque is one of the fastest-growing high-tech markets in the country," says Lisa Dettweiler, VP/GM of Comcast Cable's Albuquerque system. "People are returning to the area because of the energy and opportunity here."

Like the city it serves, Comcast is fully committed to the digital life. In 1999, the cable op began the upgrade of Albuquerque's 3,200 miles of plant, converting a 450-MHz analog network to a two-way, HFC-based 870-MHz operation. The project was completed in 2001.

According to Jeff Frazier, Comcast's area director of engineering, the crew was met with "quite a few challenges" as they worked to tie together its multiple franchises. "It's a huge area, about 50 miles by 40, and we had to cover a lot of ground," Frazier says. "Some of our service areas were split by the Sandia mountain range, so we had to extend fiber through a pass along I-40 over to the east. And to the west, we had to cross the Rio Grande, which was also a challenge."

The region's rugged geography wasn't the only hindrance the Comcast team faced. Because digital service was contracted by the Isleta Pueblo - a sovereign nation located 14 miles south of Albuquerque on the west side of the Rio Grande - the upgrade had to proceed with respect for the land and the people who make their home there. "It's sacred land," Frazier says. "Any time you have to put a shovel in the ground or anything else that may disturb the land, you have to do an archeology study. It's a demanding process, but we got it done in record time."

That kind of sensitivity for cultural mores goes a long way toward illuminating the sort of regard with which Comcast is held in the community at large. Much attention has been paid to the Comcast Cares program, an employee volunteer initiative that Dettweiler says is rooted in the MSO's corporate mandate.

"Albuquerque has had one of the top turnouts in the company in terms of the number of volunteers we've drummed up and the amount of hours our people have put in," she says. This year, the Cable Television Public Affairs Association (CTPAA) has honored the system with four Beacon Awards in recognition of its outstanding community service record.

Of course, service is only a part of Comcast's directive; at the end of the day, a cable company's main function is to provide entertainment to its customer base. To that end, the Albuquerque system has begun to take advantage of its new fiber by offering interactive video service.

"We've had a pretty solid VOD run," says area director of marketing Christie Coletti Rossi. "We did a systemwide pre-launch for six months or so, and today it's available to all of our digital customers."

Video-on-demand content will be limited until Comcast can strike further deals with content providers. "A lot of the content we offer now is licensed through providers we've had previous relationships with, like Discovery," Rossi says. "We don't have the rights to a lot of content right now, but we will."

Although Albuquerque is not offering SVOD at present, TVN Entertainment was selected as the system's transport partner last March. Under the terms of the trial agreement, TVN will manage and deliver content that may be licensed to Comcast by HBO, Showtime and other programmers at some future date. (If Comcast HQ's "triple bucket" model of free, movie and subscription VOD content is a success in Philadelphia, expect the same approach to get a trial in New Mexico by Q4.)

Frazier puts the contingency rates for VOD at 10% throughout the network, although the present demand is nowhere near as high: "That's our theoretical average, it's our target. But we did quite a bit of engineering to anticipate usage of product."

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Cable Runs Through The Land of Adobe

Cable World, June 2, 2003

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