Selling Cable in the Land of Rabbit Ears

Cable World,  Dec 16, 2002  

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The system upgrade began in fall 1998; it was completed in the suburbs by the end of 2000 and in the city of Minneapolis in December 2001.

Minneapolis had an A/B dual 450-MHz system that was converted into an 870-hybrid fiber/coax system. In the suburbs, a more standard 450 system was converted into the 750-MHz system typically built by Time Warner Cable.

The extra bandwidth in the city allows Time Warner to carry the extra PEG channels the system had been carrying, said VP of engineering Scott Olson, who recently marked his 20th anniversary with the system. "I started out as a service technician and kind of worked my way up the ladder. I got to see the technologies evolve," said Olson, who was an engineer during the planning stage of the upgrade and then got promoted and ultimately supervised the upgrade.

The new system relies on Scientific-Atlanta optics, a Philips RF platform and S-A set-top boxes.

The system has one master facility in Eden Prairie that services Minneapolis and all of the surrounding suburbs. It also services all of its digital and high-speed data platforms in New Ulm with a 100-mile fiber link. "The only thing the head-end there supports is our analog channel lineup," said Olson. "Everything else is transported from our master facility in Eden Prairie to New Ulm."

The system has 18 hub sites, most of which serve about 20,000 homes. Within the city of Minneapolis, Time Warner Cable has four virtual hubs, each of which serves between 60,000 and 80,000 homes.

Once the upgrade was completed, the engineering department got to work on customer service. New drop-back procedures keep customer disruption to a minimum when software is upgraded; if something doesn't work right, the system can be quickly restored using the old software. "And we do this in the early a.m. hours so there's less impact on customers," Olson said.

The system has also instituted a new way to bury drops. "Basically from Nov. 15 to April 15 the grounds froze up here," so cable drops to newly installed homes and housing developments were left on the ground and buried when the ground thawed in the spring, he said. Now, as foundations are being laid, the cable operator installs conduits. "We just pull this drop through the conduit we've already got in place and plug them in," said Olson. "As a result we've got much happier customers."

With these and other changes in place, Time Warner Cable's trouble calls have dropped from 7,300 in 2001 to 5,400 in 2002 through November, leading to a 26% reduction in truck rolls and a reduction in costs. "We've devoted more resources to training our employees," Brown said. The advanced services put new demands on field technicians as well as on phone operators, who, once trained, were able to troubleshoot and avoid sending out technicians.

Minneapolis boasts a $300 million television advertising market. Cable ad sales are not measured, but ad buyers and broadcasters estimate that cable's share of the market is between 5% and 15%, depending on the demographic.