21285 - SCTE Broadband Dec2021 COMPLETE v1

44 Vol. 43 No. 4 - November 2021 Issue With BT as the network provider, Westminster Cable was responsible for marketing, sales, customer services and programming. I was responsible for operations, control room, customer service, sales support and BT liaison. Now this was at the very start of broadband cable in the UK and selling multichannel TV, videodata and a novel laser- disc based VoD service was a challenge to the existing 4 channel terrestrial marketplace. We solved this by fitting out a Winnebago motor home with a full demonstration, the ubiquitous BBC Micro playing a major role in the simulation system. Sales were sometimes over-exuberant and I remember having to provide several free TV sets to residents of a private block of flats in St Johns Wood who had been told they would get ‘noise free, brilliant TV colour pictures’ even though they had black and white sets! Two amusing incidents come to mind: I remember getting a telephone call from an irate hotel owner in Soho and dashing over there with a bundle of pound notes to rescue my engineer who had fallen through the ceiling of the bridal suite whilst surveying the attic space and deposited several eons of dust and debris on the beautiful white bed! The second involved installation in No 10 Downing Street. We provided six cable channels, on top of their existing MATV system, fed with 1.25” coax from a street cabinet some 700+ metres away in Victoria. A service call found me grabbing a taxi and shouting ‘No 10 Downing Street‘ to the driver! The problem turned out to be in the original MATV aerial feed, a mix of 50 and 75ohm ‘N’ connectors and I had just finished checking the TV in the office of Margaret Thatcher’s Press Secretary (Sir Bernard Ingram), when I got a tap on the shoulder from the PM herself who asked if I could fix the TV set in the upstairs flat. I chased after her up two flights of stairs with a spectrum analyser on my back (there is a lift but apparently Mrs Thatcher always preferred the stairs) and performed a miracle cure (it was the original ‘N’ connector problem) before being invited to take a cup of tea with the Prime Minister. For me this was very special since at the time I was chair of the local Conservative Party and of the Ash Parish Council. All good things come to an end and, by the late 80’s, BT had decided not to invest in ongoing development of their baseband switch and roll-out essentially stopped. This coincided with an offer from Racal to help with a new start-up company, Paknet. So, you left cable? Not really and not for long! This was still in the days of dial-up modems and there was a problem with the increasing use of debit and credit cards. Many retailers only had dial-up access to their banks and authorisation took for ever. Paknet provided a RF modem solution, utilising the Vodafone backhaul network – a bit like 4G layered on an analogue phone network! Development and initial deployment went smoothly and within a couple of years I found myself twiddling my thumbs. Luckily my old boss fromWestminster Cable, Peter Alden, had moved to Videotron and in 1991 asked me to join him there at the Lewisham head office. It’s important to reflect on the fact that the late ‘80s, early ‘90s saw a huge shift in investment in cable in the UK; the government allowed foreign investment for the first time and attracted North American companies to compete for the new franchises being released. Videotron had a successful from the industry