Dermot O’Carroll

Dermot O’Carroll is senior vice president of engineering and network operations for Rogers Cable Communications in Canada.

Has Rogers Cable begun to integrate with the Rogers wireless division?

Up to now, we had focused on the simple bundling of products, which is about convenience. With the launch of Home Phone, we started moving into adding value. The first thing we’re doing is a common voice mailbox across wireline and wireless. The next feature is about free calling, including long distance, between Rogers Home Phone customers and from a Rogers Home Phone (RHP) landline to a (Rogers) wireless customer. The corollary of that for the wireless customers is that we’ll add the ability to add their RHP phone into that wireless family plan.

The next steps involve fixed/mobile convergence. We’ve been in trial on UMA (unlicensed mobile access) for a while now, and we’ve found it to be very successful both over cable and DSL access. Our intent is to launch it before the end of ’07.

How has telephony impacted technical operations?

Our focus has always really been about reliability and performance, not about price. We’d don’t heavily discount. But despite that, we’ve been growing much faster than our expectations. The impact has been that we’ve had to do a significant skill shift, in terms of what is required in a Home Phone environment both at the technical operations and engineering levels.

The approach we had taken in getting ready for Home Phone was to put a great focus on operations processes and on network support systems tools to give us the ability to understand and measure the performance of the product from the perspective of the customer. Also, because of our attention to reliability, we put a great deal of focus on things like change control. We also spent a fair bit of capital improving the performance of the network overall.

Rogers is known for a high quantity and diversity of programming. Is your spectrum getting crowded? If so, what’s next?

First of all, we are predominantly 860 MHz across our systems, so we have more spectrum flexibility than most of our colleagues. That being said, we are very aggressive, in that right now we have about 36 HD channels in our lineup and a very full lineup of ethnic channels. So while we have lots of spectrum, we have intention to use it up.

We’re looking at all of the options. The most obvious one is that if you have some individual analog channels that are low usage, you can digitize those and get that back. You could do analog reclamation. Then there’s advanced compression and switched digital broadcast and the 1 Gig rebuild. We’re looking at all of them. The choice is really about timing, in terms of the availability and scalability of the technology or solution.

How do you explain Rogers’ strong engineering reputation, as well the ability to keep your technical teams up to speed?

The force of it all comes from the leadership and drive of Ted Rogers. His background is as a lawyer, but we joke in that he’s also our chief engineer. Ted has always stressed the need for us to have leadership in quality and innovation and that the basis of being leaders was having strength in engineering. In terms of keeping up with the changes in technologies, I would say that our challenge is keeping up with Ted, his vision and his drive. The reality is that if you hire good people and give them great challenges, they will rise to meet the challenge.