Interview Date: August 15, 2024
Interviewer: Stewart Schley
[see also his oral history from 2002]
STEWART SCHLEY: Hello everybody, welcome to the latest iteration of the Hauser Oral History Series presented by Syndeo Institute at the Cable Center. I am Stewart Schley, and with me is an individual who has appeared on this stage before. Ron Hranac was here in 2002 recounting his early career in I think what we still mostly called the cable television business at the time. A lot has changed since 2002, and Ron has receipts to present a history of the technology and engineering progress of the industry. Ron, before you start, I would like you to hold up — This is a series of convention badges that most people may have one or two of these colorful ribbons. He’s got about 20 and it testifies to the fact that Ron has sort of an everyman persona in the cable, technology and engineering space. So bottom line, we are thrilled to have you come back and talk about the second stage of your career.
RON HRANAC: Thank you for the introduction, Stewart, it’s a pleasure to be here and I think we will have fun doing a bit of a catch up, if you will, since 2002. You’re right, a lot has happened since then.
SCHLEY: Brilliant segway so let’s just dive in, Ron. What was 2002 in a cable context and who were you in 2002?
HRANAC: 2002 I was working for Cisco. I had joined the company a couple years before that and Cisco was promoting products into the cable industry that were DOCSIS [Data-Over-Cable Service Interface Specifications] based, as I think many will recall that in the ’90s and a little bit before the ’90s, any data over cable was proprietary in nature. And when the DOCSIS specs were introduced the first ones were introduced in the ’90s. Cisco took that on and I was hired as an RF and HFC person or hybrid fiber coax person to bring that expertise to that networking company, that was just after I think 2002 would’ve been just after the DOCSIS 2.0 specs were introduced. So 1.0 was in the ’96-ish timeframe if I remember correctly, somewhere around there. And then 1.1 came out not long after that and then 2.0 in 2000-2001, somewhere in there.
SCHLEY: Well, it’s interesting because you really personified, you are sort of a bridge between these two worlds. Data on one hand and the traditional HFC and RF environment– it had to be sort of an energizing time I presume.
HRANAC: It was. I brought a lot of expertise from having worked in cable systems. Climbing poles and doing maintenance in the outside plant and installs earlier in my career. So I had a lot of the hands-on experience in the cable network and when Data-Over-Cable Service Interface Specifications, good ol’ DOCSIS, was introduced. That was something new to the industry, the idea of being able to provide interactive cable modem service over cable networks. Cable operators were still in the business of upgrading their plants from one-way to two-way and that continued for a while. I remember some of the cable modems that had dial-up return rather than using the cable network return.
SCHLEY: To get the signal back.
HRANAC: To get the signal back, because their networks had not been upgraded [to two-way] yet. I was right in the middle of a lot of that with Cisco around that time.
SCHLEY: Did you sense that this was going to be big at the time?
HRANAC: I’ve never been real good about the crystal ball part of things but there was so much excitement in what was being done by the industry at that time in the upgrades to the networks. And I remember just being thrilled to be part of it. For me, I played a small role because so many people combined made it successful, but it was fun to be part of that. It was challenging too because it meant learning a lot of new things while it was being rolled out. This was new for the cable industry.
SCHLEY: I think that’s what’s interesting is you had a generation of technicians and engineers– By the way you mentioned the pole climbing badge. I was going to ask you about that. So you were up there shimmying up poles so you are genuine. But it was an opportunity. You mentioned to me that you are a visual learner but it was an opportunity to learn new stuff.
HRANAC: It was. One of the fun things I like about having worked in the cable industry is that it’s kind of like a hobby with a paycheck. All right, I know for some people they may say “no it’s not,” but for me it has been like that. It’s been fun. I have never stopped learning as long as I’ve been in this industry and I think that that’s something that people who really take it seriously should follow. Don’t stop learning.
SCHLEY: I love the hobby with the paycheck analogy, and I’ve known you for a long time as sort of an ambassador or almost an evangelist of cable technology, always willing to share insights and ideas. You have been a journalist and a publisher and writer and you’ve always kept your hand in the side of business that’s related to educating the community. What was in that for you, what did you enjoy?
HRANAC: That goes back to when I started cable in the early ’70s. I was fortunate to have worked with some folks who had been in the system since it was built in 1953 and others later in the ’50s and ’60s, but they were all willing to put up with my crazy questions, seemingly never-ending questions, and sometimes arguments. But they were willing to share what they knew and I think that’s a good example of I should pay it forward and do the same thing. I did not think that consciously at the time as I look back, that’s what I did, they set the example, and I continued the example.
SCHLEY: What was your secret sauce or is your secret sauce to making complex technology principles understandable to people like me? How do you bridge both sorts of worlds?
HRANAC: That’s a tough one but I chalk it up to me being a visual learner. When I’m looking at something that’s a complex topic it does not matter what it is, if it’s in cable or branches of science that I happen to enjoy. I have to visualize in my mind what’s going on and try to apply that to something like transmission lines, like a piece of coax with RF flowing through it, trying to visualize what’s going on inside of the coax. And when I get that mental picture in my mind then I can take that visualization and communicate it verbally or in writing.
SCHLEY: Let’s talk about that in your career progression with Cisco and beyond just kind of take us through the path from the early 2000s.
HRANAC: I was based here in Colorado, I had team members scattered all over the place. Cisco of course is a global company so I had team members in Asia and Europe and Australia and all over the US. That brought a pretty wide variety of expertise to the group. We had networking experts and I brought RF expertise to the group and there were a few others that did as well, all kinds of expertise in that group. And we were helping cable operators deploy DOCSIS technology for the most part. And I think it was in 2005, I may have the year off a year or two, Cisco acquired Scientific-Atlanta. And I remember at the time maybe a few months before that there were some of the usual competitive FUD that goes around the industry. One of our competitors was telling some of our customers that Cisco’s going out, they’re getting out of the cable business. And of course we had to reassure the sales team, “No, we’re not, we are staying in cable.” And just a few months later the announcement hit the street that Cisco acquired Scientific-Atlanta. Which of course was a big, big deal because it meant we are taking the stuff seriously.
SCHLEY: You are deep now.
HRANAC: And I liked that acquisition in large part because I knew a lot of the people at Scientific-Atlanta, and that [acquisition] brought Cisco some street credibility in the world of HFC and other things that S-A did. And then I started working more with the teams on the S-A side of the house at that time. My career took an interesting turn that really was not expected, around 2008, and it was an economic downturn at the time. And Cisco, like other companies, was trying to control expenses so they came out with this corporate edict that said, “essential travel only.” So that meant the salespeople going to visit customers but everybody else, you kind of gotta stay put. And some of the folks in San Jose who were involved in the standards development programs with CableLabs, specifications at CableLabs, and standards and other areas– They said, “Wait a minute Ron is in Colorado. He’s just down the street from CableLabs. Let him do this.” I had never done standards work or specifications development work before so I got involved with it in that 2008 timeframe and learned a couple interesting things about standards development. When I say standards I include specifications and so everything. I learned two things about it. First of all it’s a very political process, as you would expect. I found it was maybe half technical stuff, because standards have to be technical to be done correctly. And the other part was the politics and that’s the companies advocating for their positions and their products.
SCHLEY: They want their stuff to be the standard?
HRANAC: Yes. As I continued getting more and more involved in standards work I found that it was the same people from all these different companies that were representing their companies. So several of them became very good friends. Even though we work for competing companies in some cases we are all good friends because we have this goal. And sometimes it’s out there a little ways, but the goal of getting this document put together and published. But I found that I really liked it.
SCHLEY: OK, that was my question. Why, what about it?
HRANAC: I think part of it is the creativity of putting together a specification or a standard. Part of it is being part of a team, because these standards and specs are a result of teamwork and there’s a lot of people doing a lot of hard work behind the scenes. It’s fun being part of that and it’s fun leaving maybe a few fingerprints on one of these documents and saying “That’s pretty cool, I did a little bit. The whole team did everything.”
SCHLEY: And now your influences are extending into the world, at least from a modest standpoint.
HRANAC: Even now in retirement I am still active on a volunteer basis in several standards and specs groups to this day.
SCHLEY: Talk about what you are talking about when you talk about standards. Use maybe DOCSIS or PacketCable but give us a sense of what we were working on.
HRANAC: Oh gosh I was working on standards and specifications through SCTE [Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers]. Of course SCTE is an ANSI [American National Standards Institute] recognized standards-setting body, and I’ve had a role in a lot of the standards and specifications and operational practices that SCTE is involved in. IEEE, I got involved with the group there and that work there is pretty much finished. They’re doing some cross the T’s dot the I’s, before final publication, and then CableLabs stuff.
SCHLEY: The reason I asked if you liked it– to me it seems like a grind. You know these documents are hundreds of pages? A standard or specification?
HRANAC: Most aren’t that big [but some can be]. Most of the documents are 10, 20, 30 pages, a really long one might be 50 pages. I do have to confess there’s one document that I was involved with in an SCTE working group that I chair, and it’s called Mathematics of Cable. We proposed this to [SCTE’s] engineering committee a few years ago, 2020-ish, somewhere around there, [and said] this might be 50 pages of equations and examples of how to use [them] and maybe 100 if we really stretch it. By the time it was published, [it was] 425 pages of mathematics stuff. It’s one of the most downloaded documents on SCTE’s [standards] download page.
SCHLEY: This is the mathematics of cable. Wow, it’s deep. You worked I think after Cisco for an interesting company called High Speed Access Corporation.
HRANAC: That was right before Cisco.
SCHLEY: So, let me back up then, you’re talking about the seminal early development of DOCSIS and data over cable. What was High Speed Access?
HRANAC: High Speed Access was a company that is no longer around but they were providing a revenue sharing high-speed Internet service to primarily smaller cable operators that did not have the technical staff or technical expertise, or even in some cases the financial resources to go out and buy a cable modem termination system. So HSA would go in and work with cable operators on a partnership basis and revenue-sharing basis and they would provide the equipment and expertise and the set up and the billing and help with that.
SCHLEY: Could cable companies not have done that on their own at the time?
HRANAC: Bigger cable companies did, but the smaller ones at the time really could not, so they partnered with HSA, and I think there were a couple other companies that did that sort of thing.
SCHLEY: In that regard Ron, HSA and @Home at a larger level really were these enabling agents to help make that transition to the data world.
HRANAC: They were because the reality is high-speed data over cable was new to the industry and everybody was learning about it.
SCHLEY: And you had a role I think internationally with that company as well, correct?
HRANAC: I did, I was the VP of engineering for High Speed Access International as they took that model outside of the US and were marketing it in Asia, South America, Europe.
SCHLEY: That sounds like a lot of travel.
HRANAC: It was. Which was fine because the consulting company I worked with, Coaxial International, prior to that was nine years of international travel.
SCHLEY: Okay. What about the talent influx and how did it change, what was the profile of a new engineer to the industry during this transformation to data? What kind of people were you beginning to look for as opposed to who you may have hired, I mean “you” collectively, in the industry a couple years before.
HRANAC: That’s a tough one and I think even tougher today. A lot of the engineering programs at universities focus on computer technology, IT, the IT side of it and there aren’t that many RF engineers coming out of universities these days, and even back then there were fewer and fewer. Yes, there are degree programs that graduate engineers who have a background in that, but they were a minority back then and it was becoming smaller and smaller and it was more the data computer side. So if you think about new engineers coming into the industry then and even today, they have a lot of expertise in the computer side of the world. Not so much in what is RF and HFC.
SCHLEY: But we still need the RF and HFC guys right?
HRANAC: We do and unfortunately there are fewer and fewer of them in the industry. They’ve got hair that is this color [pointing to his head] and they have retired or left the industry, or you know gone to the great headend up in the sky. Not the TCI Headend in the Sky. Yes.
SCHLEY: Good one to get in. I just wanted to ask about that from a looking ahead standpoint. I know it’s part oral history but we also want to know what you think about where the world is going. There has long been discussion of whether the HFC last mile coaxial connection will live on forever or will it extinguish over time. What is your view about the longevity of HFC?
HRANAC: Oh gosh, for years I have said in seminars and sometimes in articles that I’ve written that fiber-to-the-home is the end goal. And I think that as the industry looks at that, yeah, it’s the end goal, but it’s always been about five years away to reach that end goal. Because a brand-new build of fiber-to-the-home can be pricey. So, to be fair the cost has come way down over the years which is good, and most cable operators have at least some fiber-to-the-home deployments now but it’s usually in single-digit percentages.
SCHLEY: Mostly we still have an HFC environment.
HRANAC: The HFC environment, thanks to DOCSIS and to ongoing improvements in technology in the years to come, HFC still has a long life ahead of it. It is not going away anytime soon. Yes, it will gradually go away and yes it will gradually be replaced by fiber-to-the-home. I don’t think anybody would argue with that. The question is when. Because if we think about the coax side of things, the coaxial cable tends to be the limit on capacity. Optical fiber– I can think back to an article in Communications Technology in 1990.
SCHLEY: Were you the editorial director or editor of that? At some point you were.
HRANAC: I did serve as a VP of editorial for about a year for them. But Lawrence Lockwood, a really sharp engineer, wrote an article and he calculated the capacity of single mode optical fiber in 1990, and it came out to the equivalent of 3.3 million analog TV channels in one fiber at the same time. The capacity has improved because the fiber has improved but that’s incredible capacity. So what is the limit? The boxes on the ends of the fiber, and the coax in between [the fiber and the customer]. The coaxial cable that we use still has a usable bandwidth to 3 GHz, 6 GHz maybe a bit higher, and that is upper frequency. So we have not used all the capability of the HFC network yet.
SCHLEY: So would you still convey that we are five years out, or do you think there’s a longer time?
HRANAC: I don’t know if it’s going to be five years or longer term. I think it depends on how aggressive the industry is about rolling things out and replacing it. Given the way cable operators, particularly the major ones, are rolling out DOCSIS 4.0 technology with either full-duplex DOCSIS or what’s called frequency division duplexing, some people call it extended spectrum DOCSIS. We are looking at upper frequency limits, by at least one cable operator, going to 1.8 GHz in their plants with a high-split return path. SCTE’s Interface Practices Subcommittee is updating all of its standards and specs to 3 GHz and most of the manufacturers of things like connectors and cables are spec’ing to 3 GHz now.
SCHLEY: And from a layperson’s viewpoint, how fast does that get me in terms of the data transmission rate to my home or back upstream?
HRANAC: Well, depending on the architecture of the network and a few other things we are talking multi-gigabits per second in each direction.
SCHLEY: Okay, symmetrical multi-gigabit, how far have we come, right?
HRANAC: Oh yeah.
SCHLEY: I wanted to ask you about one area that you’ve had some expertise and involvement related to DOCSIS, and that’s when I’ll probably misname as proactive maintenance or…
HRANAC: Proactive network maintenance.
SCHLEY: Can you talk about what your role has been in fostering that technique and process?
HRANAC: When the DOCSIS 3.1 specifications were published in 2013, well actually prior to them being published, there were some questions about “What about doing things proactively? Why don’t we include proactive network maintenance ideas in the spec?” PNM or proactive network maintenance really came about as a result of a paper published and presented by Alberto Campos and some of his colleagues from CableLabs in 2008. They proposed this idea of using cable modems as basically test devices in the field to identify the existence of problems, and to locate them remotely without rolling a truck.
SCHLEY: They can sort of sniff out the network.
HRANAC: They can do a variety of measurements and then based on what the results of the measurements are you can overlay that on a system design map, say a digital map, and say, ok, all of these modems in this area have the same issues, so we can figure out where [the problem] is and where it isn’t. And cable operators started working on that in 2009 when the CableLabs PNM working group was formed and I joined that working group around that time. Just before DOCSIS 3.1 came out, we said “Why don’t we put this in the spec?” It was not mandated in the spec in the current version of DOCSIS 3.0 at that time. So the 3.1 PHY working group, which I was part of, decided to put it in section 9 of the 3.1 PHY specification, [which] has all this PNM stuff in it and that spells out how to do it. And even to this day work continues to update the capabilities both in what CableLabs is doing. There’s also a PNM workgroup in SCTE and the two working groups are very complementary and I am involved in both working groups. So the work continues. The cable operators have developed their own [PNM] tools in some cases. Third-party companies have developed PNM tools that they sell to the industry and cable operators have been rolling [PNM] out and enjoying the benefits of reducing truck rolls and identifying remote problems without the truck roll. One of my favorites that I love to give an example of: There’s a particular signature in the return path that more often than not is indicative of a loose F connector on the back of the cable modem. And I think it was Comcast that identified this, so they would make phone calls to customers and say “We are doing some remote diagnostics on your modem and it looks like there could be a loose connection on the modem or maybe outside the house. Could you check to see if the connector is loose and if it is snug it up?” And about half the time the customer said “yeah, it was loose” and so they tighten it up and that signature would go away. And you can do this remotely without sending a tech to the house.
SCHLEY: Was it usually a connector on the modem itself?
HRANAC: Usually on the modem.
SCHLEY: It sounds like you were an advocate for putting that PNM architecture language in the spec itself.
HRANAC: I’m one of several. There were several people that were involved in pushing that and I think it was Bruce Currivan with Broadcom who wrote a lot of the material for section 9 of the 3.1 PHY spec. He’s retired now but he was in that group and we were saying “We’ve got to do this. We gotta get this in the spec.” And have the hooks so people can do it.
SCHLEY: You mentioned some names, Alberto Campos, talked about Lawrence Lockwood, but I just wanted to ask you if you look at the panoply of your career, who were a couple or three of the signature influences you’ve known and worked with and learned from?
HRANAC: There are so many, certainly the guy who hired me, Bill Raschka, at TelePrompTer, may he rest in peace. But I think back to some of the technical pioneers that played a bigger role in the cable industry. One was Len Ecker who was with Jerrold. I attended one of his seminars in the ’70s that was put on by TelePrompTer. They brought him in and others from Jerrold. I still have the seminar manual in my library. But I remember how sharp he was but how finicky he was about, as an example, when measuring signal level and stating it using decibels, it’s dBmV, not dB. And I think I picked some of that up from him. Another one was Ken Simons. A lot of people may not be old enough to remember Ken. I met him at a Cable-Tec Expo years ago and he was really getting up there in years.
SCHLEY: And Ken worked for who?
HRANAC: Ken worked for Jerrold and he invented a lot of the technology that we take for granted today like the multi-taps, the directional multi-taps. Some of his prototypes are on display in the technical archives at the Cable Center and to me that’s like looking at a gold mine of stuff. This guy invented the stuff.
SCHLEY: And then anybody else who may be in a more data-centric era come to mind?
HRANAC: Well, in the modern era, Jim Chiddix is one who influenced me. I feel fortunate to have known him for a long, long time, since about 1980; such a wonderful person.
SCHLEY: And tell us who Jim is.
HRANAC: Jim Chiddix, I met him in Hawaii at an SCTE seminar, 1980, and he did a presentation on preventive maintenance in cable networks. Met him there, that was ATC at the time. He came to Denver and became the head of engineering for then ATC and later Time Warner. He’s retired now. But just a wonderful, wonderful person. He and his colleagues have contributed so much to the development of HFC. Louis Williamson, for example, was one of those who worked with Jim and did so much in the development of HFC. Tom Kolze from Broadcom. A lot of people don’t know Tom. Tom has been involved in standards and specs development work for decades. And a lot of what’s in DOCSIS and particularly the physical layer stuff is his handiwork. He is genius brilliant, and a good friend. He is not retired yet but a brilliant guy and I love working with him on standards and specs committees even to this day, such a good guy. He may not know it but he is a mentor of mine.
SCHLEY: It’s interesting to hear you talk about these individuals. What comes through is there’s really this collegial sort of mentality, willingness to share, prop each other up. Is that a fair way to describe it?
HRANAC: I think so. The cable industry has had kind of a family-like characteristic to it for as long as I can remember. Yes, we are a big industry now, certainly way bigger than we were in the ’70s, but there’s always been this attitude of it’s kind of like family, like a small industry even though it is big. And that continues even to this day. Everybody knows everybody. Maybe not literally, but so many people know other people in this industry and they work together. Yes, sometimes we work on competing thoughts and ideas, but we all have a common goal and it’s to make sure we do it right.
SCHLEY: And I always thought some of that heritage may spring from sort of the absence early on of direct geographical competition. Mostly we had one operator to a market and it allowed people to sort of exchange and share ideas you may not see that in the retail industry or the banking industry or other structural industries.
HRANAC: In particular among our competitors like the telephone industry. To be fair the cable industry partners with the telephone industry sometimes. For example, wireless services, but we also compete with them, voice services. I had done some consulting work way back when with some of the telco side of the world and it was interesting to see their perspective on things. They had a difficult time understanding how we did things. I think they thought of us as kind of this cowboy in the old West mentality, which is true to a large degree. Telephone industry? Very formal about the way they do things. Very corporate. It’s gotta be, we gotta get all these things created, the specs, the standards, the products. By the time they would get a decision made on something we said we are just going to go out and do it. And yes the trail of technology is littered with failures but there’s also a lot of successes. So the cable industry was much more willing to take risks and if we look back on some of those risks, geostationary satellites in 1975. Big risk. Big risk. The satellite dishes then were $100 grand in 1975 dollars, for 10 meter dishes.
SCHLEY: But that willingness to use a ready-fire-aim sort of approach was —
HRANAC: We did that a lot.
SCHLEY: It was interesting. Ron, I want to ask you about — We talked a lot about data and the data revolution. What about interactive television? Did that ever trip your trigger or were you involved in some of the development work around using the TV set as an instrument?
HRANAC: I was not involved in that directly; most of the work I’ve done was with the outside network. I like to say that I am a PHY guy. Physical layer guy, and I used to joke with some of my colleagues at Cisco I can spell RF, I cannot spell IP. But the data guys, you guys can spell IP but you can’t spell RF.
SCHLEY: And you know if you think about the entirety of your career and it’s been a long enriching career in and around this industry, what’s been fun about it? Beyond the paycheck, beyond the contribution to important specifications, what did you like about working in this business?
HRANAC: The technology. I have loved technical things for as long as I can remember going back to very early grade school. I grew up with the space race, so I was exposed to that.
SCHLEY: You wanted to be an astronaut.
HRANAC: I wanted to be an astronaut at one point.
SCHLEY: Didn’t we all?
HRANAC: And then I wanted to be a particle physicist by the time I reached junior high. Never went [down] that path but I still follow it. But I had a couple of influences that are technical that go way, way back when I was in elementary school. My maternal grandfather was a big influence. Eighth grade education but reportedly had an IQ around 190. We had discussions that I cherish to this day. When I was 10 years old we were talking about the Theory of Relativity and the pyramids in Egypt. So that was an influence, but another one was remember I had a pocket transistor radio and I could pick up one or two local radio stations in the daytime but at night I’d put the earphone in my ear and get under the covers and I could tune in radio stations from distant cities. And it was magic. I know why that’s the case now, but at the time that was magic. I want to find out more about this stuff. So those kinds of experiences I think really pushed me into a love for technology, and working in cable — that love is continued. I have loved the hands-on part, working with the test equipment, and working with new products and new innovations, new rollouts of things. I know it’s an old cliché, but change is the only constant. I love it.
SCHLEY: I can tell you love it and are fascinated by it. Just to probe a little deeper where you were when you’re under the covers listening to the radio and what stations were you picking up?
HRANAC: Well this would have been mostly in northern Idaho, my hometown, Lewiston. We lived in Sandpoint, Idaho, for a little bit, too, so way up north. But in those places, just the local AM stations [during the day]. I remember at nighttime hearing KTWO from Casper. I think that is a clear channel 50,000 watts station.
SCHLEY: That’s a ways away.
HRANAC: Yeah, a way from northern Idaho. There was one in Oklahoma City that I could hear. There were a couple others that were the more powerful stations that could be picked up with a little pocket transistor radio, but daytime they were not there. I could not hear them in the daytime and at night I could hear [the distant stations].
SCHLEY: You did a stint in radio. I just want to make it clear for the record. You were a DJ.
HRANAC: I was. I did that from ’74 to ’78. I worked for a country western radio station in my hometown. So I worked for the cable company during the week and the radio station on weekends. When I would take vacation from the cable company I would fill in the weekday morning shifts and stuff for the guys. The guys who were there would go off on vacation somewhere and I would fill in for them during the week. And then do the weekend gig for the radio station. And had a ball doing that.
SCHLEY: But in addition to stacks of wax and playing music for your legions of fans, I’m guessing you were also sort of captivated by the technology you were using, right?
HRANAC: The chief engineer who hired me was a good friend and I would help him do things like rewire the studio and stuff, some transmitter maintenance and that sort of thing. But I remember one time when I was on the air one of the pots, that’s a volume control, on the mixer board stopped working. I don’t remember if it was for one of the cart machines for commercials or for one of the turntables. I popped the panel open and I looked. Oh, crap, the wire has broken loose, physically broken loose. So I went and grabbed the soldering iron from the test bench in the back and put a long play song on. I don’t remember which one it was.
SCHLEY: How brilliant!
HRANAC: Fired up the soldering iron and then soldered this wire while I was on the air. Got it back, did a quick test, yes it works. Folded the mixer board back up and continued like nothing had happened.
SCHLEY: This is emblematic of the fact that you were and are a hands-on engineer from the get go.
HRANAC: I’ve also been a ham radio operator since the mid-’70s so it’s played over into that hobby too. I found that ham radio and cable have been very complementary.
SCHLEY: What captivates you about astronomy? You are an astronomer?
HRANAC: I am an amateur astronomer. For me, I think the part I like best is sharing the view through the eyepiece. I’m a longtime member of Denver Astronomical Society and we have open house events and public nights. I do lectures on meteorites. But I love setting up a telescope out on the park lawn during open houses and I love seeing the reaction.
SCHLEY: Just calling people over?
HRANAC: No, they stand in line to come and look through the telescope, to look at Saturn or the moon or something, and I love the reaction of kids and grown-ups. For a long, long time I have dressed up in a costume at home on Halloween and set a telescope up in the driveway and it’s fun. What used to be little kids, that were five-year-olds, and now come around at high school ages go, “Oh good you still have the telescope. I remember coming by here to look through your telescope when I was five or six.” Then the parents came up and they are very complimentary. So kids get a double treat, grown-ups get a double treat; they get the candy and a peek through the telescope.
SCHLEY: Awesome. I wanted to ask you, in addition to looking back, prognosticate a little bit about where you see the cable industry going in five years, in 10 years. Can we even reckon with that? Are we going to be AI-infused and doing holograms in the living room, what do you see happening?
HRANAC: Oh gosh. I think it’s going to be more of a gradual evolution of the industry. Yes, we will see smart devices. The customer premises equipment will become smarter, the amplifiers will be smart. The test equipment will be smart. We have some of that here already but I think we’re going to see more of that being deployed in our networks. We will continue to see HFC networks be expanded in bandwidth to 1.8 GHz, 3 GHz, who knows. Maybe higher. I wrote an article once on the capacity of coaxial cable and said we could easily go to 6 GHz.
SCHLEY: In good old coax.
HRANAC: In the coax, which is an incredible amount of RF bandwidth. So I think we’re going to continue to see the fiber get closer and closer to the home, so we’ll call it the fiber-to-the-neighborhood, maybe node + 0. I know that right now node + 0 has kind of fallen out of fashion because it’s so expensive.
SCHLEY: What does node + 0 mean?
HRANAC: Node + 0 means that after the fiber node, and the node is a box that converts light from the fiber into radio frequency signals to go into coax and vice versa. Signals coming back from the customer that are radio frequency signals, [the node] converts those to light and sends it back to the cable company. So that’s what that box does. So what is after the box? Well it’s coax. And in years past it was coax and amplifiers, coax – amplifier, coax – amplifier –,
SCHLEY: In between myself and the node.
HRANAC: Well if you are the guy at the end of the line there might be five to 10 amplifiers between the node and you. And over the years the industry has made an effort to reduce the number of amplifiers [in cascade] after the node. It reduces operational expenses, power costs, improves quality and reliability and a bunch of other things. So, node + 0 means there aren’t any amplifiers after the node. It is just coax.
SCHLEY: Pristine, pure coax.
HRANAC: Maybe it serves 50 to 85 customers and that’s it. Very expensive to do. But I think we will see more of that in the future as the costs come down. We will see more rollout of fiber-to-the-home as more and more cable operators are doing that. So it’s going to be a continued evolution.
SCHLEY: So a young version of Ron Hranac, who is maybe getting out of graduate school now, what compels she, he, or they to be interested in this technology side of the business?
HRANAC: What I’ve looked for in people who I think could do well in the industry is curiosity. About how things are. I remember several years ago interviewing Wayne Davis. He had come with an acquisition at Jones Intercable back in the ’80s and he was familiar with the articles I had written. He was studying up, Ohm’s Law and all this stuff, thinking I’m just going to nail him with all these questions — “What are the formulas for carrier-to-noise ratio?” You he studied all this. So I asked a question, “Do you like working on your own car?” Because to me somebody who can do that is somebody who is willing to have this curiosity about how things work. Come to find out he was a drag racer. I was a drag racer so we spent 90 minutes talking about drag racing.
SCHLEY: That is a successful interview right there.
HRANAC: And I went to the rest of the team and the others had interviewed him too and said oh yes, Wayne will be a good engineer. And of course he was. He went on to have a very, very good career. That was an example from back then, but for me it’s finding somebody with the curiosity about how things work and a willingness to learn. That’s key.
SCHLEY: I cannot let this moment pass since we have Ron Hranac with us without asking you to explain, because you’ve done it for me and I would love for you to do it for the audience, a technical concept. A lot of us think that coaxial cable has a lot of bandwidth and carrying capacity because the copper is thick. I mean that’s what we think intuitively. Can you just explain what coaxial means and why it is important in terms of infusing signals down the pipe?
HRANAC: Coaxial cable can be described as a two conductor transmission line to transmit signals from here to somewhere else. The two conductors comprise a center conductor, a round wire in the middle. There is a plastic insulating material around that wire and surrounded by a metallic conductor, a tube or a pipe, or in the case of the cable in the home, a foil and braid combination. So we have two conductors, a center conductor and a shield. And the radio frequency signals propagate through the coaxial cable, and it’s not the thickness of the metal because the RF current travels mostly on the surface and close to the surface of the center conductor and the inside of the shield. So there is this RF current traveling along the surface of those two conductors, and then there is an electromagnetic field propagating through that plastic, that dielectric material. Now interestingly, and this is what seems counterintuitive, the smaller the diameter of the cable, the higher the bandwidth and the higher the frequency [capability] of that cable.
SCHLEY: Because?
HRANAC: It has to do with something called a transverse electric mode cut off. It’s related to the physical [cross section] dimension of the cable. The bigger the dimension, the lower that frequency is. The smaller the dimension, the higher the frequency, or the higher the capacity. Now going against that is, as you go much higher in frequency the attenuation of the cable increases.
SCHLEY: You have challenges.
HRANAC: You cannot transmit signals at very high frequencies for very long distances. There’s too much attenuation. But practically speaking we could easily get 6 GHz through hardline cable like half-inch cable and three-quarter-inch cable. The so-called TE mode cut off for half-inch cable is about 11, 11-1/2 GHz. This is hardline cable. 7.5 to 8 GHz for the big three-quarter inch cable; about 11, 11-1/2 GHz for half inch cable. And then drop cable, the series 6 drop cable in the home, somewhere around [29] GHz, but the attenuation of [29] GHz in drop cable would be insane.
SCHLEY: Ron, when did you learn this, the properties and propagation abilities of coaxial cables? Was this in ’72 when you first joined the business?
HRANAC: No I did not know this back then. This is something I picked up somewhere along the way reading. Probably more in my involvement in ham radio when we use coaxial cable to connect transmitters to antennas. Well, what’s the capacity of cable? So I would do research on this and read through engineering books and reference books. Oh, cool, there’s this TE mode thing. So I wrote an article about it for Broadband Library that explains [it], here’s the formula and here are the bandwidths of these cables. And realistically we could easily get 6 GHz out of our cables and there would still be room to spare. It’s a bunch of spectrum.
SCHLEY: Okay my last lesson learned technical question has to do with amplification. I always thought of amplifiers as the redheaded stepchildren of the industry because they perform an incredibly important role but they also can be problematic, and you told me once that you worked for a cable company, you don’t need to name them, because they had something like a cascade of 72 amplifiers.
HRANAC: It was 67 amps.
SCHLEY: And you said to me pity the guy who lived it right after 67. Because what was happening?
HRANAC: Well it’s okay to say the name it was Jones Intercable and I was with [one of their systems] in the late ’70s, early ’80s. One of my first projects going into the system was to help with the installation of Hughes AML microwave equipment to break up the long cascades. Because that system had really lengthy trunk cascades. There was no fiber in those days, it was the headend and the coax going out. Bunch of amps. The longest cascade was 67 amplifiers deep and it included a 3000 foot lake crossing, an underwater lake crossing. We had a full-time sweep tech. His job was to do sweep alignment of those amplifiers. It was a full-time job to keep that stuff lined up. When you have 67 amplifiers from the headend to the end-of-line, the picture quality is not that good. It was only a 12 channel system thankfully, but still [had] snowy pictures and cross modulation [at the end of that long cascade]. We put the microwave system in, and that came online in the 1980-ish time frame.
SCHLEY: To replace many of those amplifiers.
HRANAC: To break up the cascades. We reduced the cascades to an average of 25 to 30. We got an improvement in noise performance, not a big jump but an improvement in noise performance, and improvement in reliability and improvement in distortion performance, and so on.
SCHLEY: The good old days. Lots of amplification.
HRANAC: I had heard about a trunk cascade at a system somewhere in Canada I don’t recall exactly where. 110 amplifiers.
SCHLEY: Okay. You did what you could do with what you could do. Final tech question is what was your eureka moment around fiber optics? When did you begin to understand the amazing contribution this technology can make?
HRANAC: That would have been starting in the mid to late ’80s with Jones Intercable. Jones was the first cable operator to deploy AM fiber in a production network. ATC invented that. I will give credit to ATC’s Louis Williamson and team, who invented that. And I remember there was kind of an internal battle, not battle but a competition within Jones, between two of [our] systems. One in Broward County, Florida, and another in Augusta, Georgia. Who was going to roll out the first HFC and Augusta system beat the one in Broward County Florida and we had created this architecture called the cable area network or CAN. That was when Bob Luff was heading up the engineering at Jones and came up with this A-B switch inside a node housing. It had an A-B switch that can switch between the optical fiber receiver and the trunk input from before that. At the time we were nervous about “is this stuff was going to work and be reliable?”
SCHLEY: And you can’t disrupt people’s service. You have to keep the signals pumping.
HRANAC: We kept the previous span of coax and amplifiers connected with the A-B switch so that if the fiber failed then it would switch to the coax. That’s where I started learning a lot about optical fiber. And I remember the chief engineer from the Augusta system did a presentation in the late ’80s during one of the Jones engineering conferences here in Colorado. He explained how well that CAN architecture worked. He said they did not have the status monitoring hooked up but he said some guy robbed, he called it a package store, but a liquor store. Came out of the liquor store shooting the gun into the air and the bullet hit the fiber.
SCHLEY: Of course it did.
HRANAC: The guy probably couldn’t have hit it if he aimed at it, but he shoots the gun in the air, hit the fiber, severed the fiber. The [node’s] A-B switch switched to the coax and it took them about two weeks before they figured out that it had switched.
SCHLEY: But if I’d been home watching HBO I would not have even known, right?
HRANAC: The picture might get slightly fuzzier but you probably would not have noticed it. So that proved the reliability of the concept. I remember going to AT&T Bell Labs, in I think it was the late ’80s. And it was their facility in New Jersey where they were manufacturing the semiconductor lasers that were used with fiber. And they had Hewlett-Packard spectrum analyzer with the cable TV package and they were optimizing the bias of these lasers to work with multiple channels. And I remember talking to the engineers there at AT&T and how they said “we never believed this stuff would work.” And they had told Louis Williamson and the gang “you guys can’t do 40 channels on fiber, the distortions are going to kill you.” Their response was, “Well, we think we can. We are going to do it, we think it will work.” And sure enough it did. It was that timeframe when I really sort of said okay this fiber thing is going to have a big impact on the industry.
SCHLEY: Yes, you knew. Ron, one final topic relates to the organization called the SCTE, Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers. Maybe just talk about the role that organization has played in your life and the role you have played in its life.
HRANAC: I joined SCTE in early ’79, so about 10 years after it was founded, and had a chance to meet a lot of industry pioneers. Because SCTE was not very old, and there were a lot of folks who were my inspiration that were active in SCTE. I got involved there and then they came out a certification program in the ’84 timeframe and I went through the program which had seven exams to become certified. And knock on wood [knocks on his head] I became the first person certified in that program. But to me that was a cool way to demonstrate what to first learn. All the things that had to be learned for that certification, and then to demonstrate to peers that look, I’ve learned the stuff and I got certified in this program. That I think really helped my career. The writing for Communications Technology and speaking at SCTE seminars and conferences of the local level chapters and at Cable-Tec Expo. I spoke at most of them in the early days and just had a ball doing that. So I think SCTE had a big, big role in furthering my career. And I have tried to stay active in SCTE even after retirement. I’m still active in standards and specifications committees and working groups with SCTE to this day, helping create standards and specs for the industry. So I think it’s been a very, very beneficial relationship over the years.
SCHLEY: Well you make a good point, maybe it’s instructive to people whose careers are beginning, that there are opportunities to attain visibility and to sort of participate and contribute beyond just doing your day-to-day 9-to-5 job.
HRANAC: I think so. It goes back to something that I tell newcomers to the industry when they’re joining cable. They say “What should I do?” And my advice to them kind of parallels what my experience was: never stop asking questions, never stop learning, and be sure that you share what you know with others.
SCHLEY: Ron, another aspect of your contribution and your career that I wanted to ask about is the writing side. You’ve been a prolific author of articles, technical papers. Talk about how that came to be and what your approach is there.
HRANAC: The writing for Communications Technology started in the mid-’80s. Wayne Lasley came up to me after I had done a seminar presentation. It was either still the Rocky Mountain Meeting Group of SCTE, or chapter, I don’t remember if they had made chapter status yet. But I did a seminar on bench sweeping or something and he came up to me afterwards and said “Ron could you turn that into a magazine article?” “I have never written a magazine article. I don’t know, I could try.” He said, “That’s what editors are for.” So that turned into a three-part magazine article and the first one was in May 1985. I wrote for CT magazine until they ceased publication at the end of 2012. I wrote for its sister publications International Cable, Communications Construction, Installer Technician. Those came and went. So I wrote for all those guys. My first paper, I don’t have a copy of, it but it was something I presented not long after I started in cable, at the science and humanity symposium at University of Utah in late ’72 early ’73, I don’t remember exactly when. And it was about two-way cable and some of its promises, but that paper has been lost to history. ’84 was my first NCTA paper, and after, when we talk about other papers, I presented papers and did presentations at Expo over the years. A handful of NCTA papers but mostly Expo and other venues, but mostly SCTE papers. Combined it’s hundreds, hundreds of articles and papers. Still writing today, still authoring and co-authoring papers for SCTE. I am a peer reviewer. I just finished the peer review on papers for a session at this year’s Expo. I won’t be there, but they wanted me to be the moderator of the panel. So I said I’ll be the peer reviewer, so finalizing that. So it’s in the hundreds.
SCHLEY: But it testifies to this career of authorship and editing to not every technologist or engineer, even really good ones, have the ability to write. You agree with that?
HRANAC: Yes. There’s the ability to write, which is more difficult than it seems. And there’s also the ability to get up and speak in front of a group. I’ve seen some engineers who are incredibly sharp and they are up there reading their paper. No, don’t.
SCHLEY: I know I know.
HRANAC: But the writing part, that’s– I will forever be grateful to the editors that I worked with at CT magazine. They were so good at guiding me and helping me through some of the foibles of writing and editing. I later became a technical editor for CT magazine and I could go back through and catch stuff, and I still do that today. People go, “Oh, no, Ron is going to be reading my paper.”
SCHLEY: But through it you sorta find your voice, your writing voice. And what struck me, I’ve seen you moderate a bunch of panels and read a lot of your work, is that you have the ability to sorta write for the audience rather than for yourself. Or to convey ideas for the audience rather than for yourself, and I think that’s a trick.
HRANAC: It is. I think it’s something that’s difficult to do in writing. I took a technical writing course or two over the years and it is difficult to communicate, first of all, technical concepts on paper. And then to do it so that it’s targeted at a broader audience so the PhD can understand but so can the installer or the technician. I have tried to target most of what I write, there are some exceptions, but most of what I write to hit a broader audience, so it’s for the audience.
SCHLEY: That’s exactly what I’m saying. And that fits into your construct of be curious, ask questions, share information, share knowledge. So you’ve done that obviously a lot through your career.
HRANAC: It’s been fun. I remember in school I wasn’t particularly fond of writing. It was one of those things, I gotta do it, but did not particularly care for it. And when I started doing it in my career it was, hey, this is actually fun. And I know in technical writing classes they’ll tell you to start with an outline and do this and do that. And for some papers I will do that. But most of the time I will think for a day or two on the topic and get kind of a mental construct in my mind of what I think I want to say, and then it is down [to] the computer, and the words just come out.
SCHLEY: I couldn’t agree more. I’m not a fan of outlines to be honest with you. Just start, just start and you will get there. I would not give that as advice to every writer but it’s how our minds work.
HRANAC: Most of the time, that’s the way I do it. For some engineering papers, gotta have an outline because I want to make sure I catch this, this and this. Most of the time, no, it’s not. The words just flow.
SCHLEY: Words to live by. I have asked you a lot of questions. I have learned and hopefully we get to share some of your insights and recollections and forward thinking perspectives to a new audience. Ron, this has been a fantastic conversation. You make this easy and I really appreciate it.
HRANAC: This is fun Stewart. It’s fun to play catch up and fill in some of the blanks since the last oral history interview.
SCHLEY: I will see you in 25 years and we will do this again and why not? Thank you for tuning into the Hauser Oral History Series, presented by Syndeo Institute at the Cable Center, with Ron Hranac. I am Stewart Schley, see you next time.
