The City of Steel Sheds Its Old Ways

Cable World,  June 30, 2003  

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Byline: SHIRLEY BRADY

Since completing its merger with AT&T Broadband, Comcast has been busy revamping many of its systems. Take the Pittsburgh region. It's been split into three systems - Pittsburgh, Tri-State and Cleveland - and some old hands have been brought in to restore what was once a top performer for pre-AT&T owner TCI.

"AT&T Broadband's Pittsburgh market included Cleveland, the Pittsburgh DMA, parts of Ohio and West Virginia and also Richmond, Va.," says former TCI-er Joseph Gamble, now VP/GM of Pittsburgh. "Our focus coming in was to get a more decentralized approach and more of the decision-making pushed down...into the local market."

With about 521,000 homes passed and more than 5,000 miles in the greater Pittsburgh region, this is the largest system in Comcast's Atlantic division. Besides being charged with revitalizing the market, Gamble - who assumed the reins after the merger closed - also must resolve a situation left behind by AT&T. "There are about 56,000 employees in Comcast, and about 2,000 are represented by a union," he says. "We have 1,000 of those employees."

Although voted in two years ago, there is no formal contract in place with the Communications Workers of America, as AT&T was in negotiations with the CWA right up until the merger. "Since then we have had quite a few negotiations with the CWA," says Brian Jeter, the system's director of corporate affairs.

Gamble notes that "after 120 days we have five bargaining units, and we now have decertifications pending in four of those." He adds that the Pittsburgh regional call center has also filed for decertification.

The union is lobbying Comcast for a contract through local ads and a letter-writing campaign. "We obviously will continue to negotiate in good faith with the CWA," Jeter says. (A local CWA spokesperson could not be reached; a national spokesman declined to comment.)

In dealing with all employees, union or not, Gamble's team has been busy "talking about what we want to do," he says. "We're now doing a lot of the things we used to do outside of the scope of normal day-to-day activities: events, Christmas parties, outings with employees. They haven't done those things probably in about four years."

Gamble has nothing but praise for what he calls "the highest-tenured cable workforce, bar none, in the entire country among former AT&T Broadband markets. The average tenure is almost 13 or 14 years, so there are a lot of well-seasoned employees here, and a very strong work ethic."

Returning to the city where he learned the ropes has helped allay apprehensions, Gamble believes. "Coming in there was a lot of nervousness about the deal," he says. "I started my career here about 16 years ago in Pittsburgh and I spent my first seven and a half years here. So there was a little bit of ease in knowing that a familiar face was going to be running the system."

With the upgrade to 750 MHz almost complete (the city of Pittsburgh should go digital by fall), "a lot of what we're doing now is employee focused," Gamble explains. "In the first three months we had over 6,000 hours total training, so we're pushing a lot of advanced product training, particularly around high-speed data."

The first item on his list was to establish clear financial and customer objectives, particularly because the system lost just over 10,500 basic customers last year. "The big point for us is to get back to basic...and deploy the synergies of the merger," he says. "This market has always been one of the highest penetrated systems for either TCI or AT&T Broadband. It's always been either the No. 1 or No. 2 system for both those companies, both on operating and financial performance."

Now at 68% penetration, one of Gamble's biggest challenges is to "grow revenue-generating units for advanced products," he says. "Digital is about 43% penetrated, which is one of the highest, I believe, in the country. Broadband telephony has been a success in this market - this system was No. 1 for customer service of all the former AT&T Broadband telephony [markets] at the time of the merger. This market had reached in its market-ready homes passed as high as 32.5% penetration, which was the best within AT&T Broadband. We've slowed that down a bit, similar to our sister cable systems, and we're still sitting at almost 29% penetration."

The only laggard is cable modem service. "The highest we'd reached until last year was 10.4% penetration in high-speed data. Part of that is because the city was the last to be rebuilt, which basically had to do with the franchise agreement which AT&T Broadband...renewed about two years ago. The suburbs began to be upgraded around 1993 to 1994; they were one of the first to be upgraded."

The team is now concentrating on getting broadband deployed in time for back-to-school this fall. "We have eight universities within our system, four of them being major [University of Pittsburgh, Duquesne University, Robert Morris College, Carnegie Mellon University]," says Gamble. Student subscribers, he adds, are "really going to drive HSD."