CableLabs Envision Vendor Forum 2019

Phil McKinney is President and CEO of CableLabs. In this capacity he heads the research and development organization responsible for charting the cable industry’s technology and innovation roadmap.

Prior to joining CableLabs, he was the vice president and chief technology officer of the $40 billion (FY12) Personal Systems Group at HP. He was responsible for long-range strategic planning, research and development (R&D) and product roadmaps for the company’s PC product lines, including mobile devices, notebooks, desktops and workstations. In addition, Phil was founder and leader of HP’s Innovation Program Office (IPO). The IPO was chartered to identify, incubate and launch adjacent and fundamentally new technologies, products and services that would become the future growth engines for HP.

Recently (February 2012), Phil released his first book on innovation and personal creativity titled Beyond The Obvious, published by Hyperion. The book is available in hardcover, digital and audio formats. The book will soon be available in Russian, Chinese, Portuguese (Brazil), Korean and Japanese.

His influence on innovation and creativity includes:

• Sharing his expertise in innovation and creativity, free of charge (in an approach he refers to as “paying it forward”) through his award winning podcast Killer Innovations™ (available on iTunes). It has been named by CIO Insight as a “must listen” podcast.
• Vanity Fair named him the “The Innovation Guru”
• MSNBC and FOX Business both call him “The Gadget Guy”
• His uncanny ability to predict what’s coming next caused him to be dubbed as the “chief seer” by The San Jose Mercury News.
• He was named as one of the “25 Most Influential People in Mobile Tech” by LAPTOP Magazine.
• He is a contributing columnist for Forbes where he writes the column “The Objective” for Forbes.com

Phil serves on the:

• Advisory Board for Hacking Autism
• Board of Directors for The Computer History Museum
• Executive Board of the Santa Clara County Council for the Boy Scouts of America

Mr. Elliott joined CableLabs in 2010 and is responsible for engaging the startup community to source new innovations for the cable industry, and for developing and commercializing game-changing innovations for the cable industry. In addition, his team assesses markets, competition, costs, and technology trends on behalf of CableLabs members.

Previously, Mr. Elliott held senior executive operating and strategy roles at Level 3 Communications and Unity Business Networks, and also was president and founder of Practiq Strategy Consultants. Mr. Elliott co-founded the International Softswitch Consortium in 1999 and served as its President and Chairman for three years. He began his career in software development and network architecture, and is an inventor on over two dozen patents and continuations.

Debbie Fitzgerald is a Director leading technology research in the Technology Policy Department at CableLabs. Over the course of her 12 years at CableLabs, Debbie has led efforts in next-gen network architectures and platforms, interactive television, advanced advertising, and energy efficiency.  She currently leads the technical efforts related to the award-winning set-top box and small network equipment energy efficiency voluntary agreements in the United States and Canada.  Debbie also leads the CableLabs program on immersive media experiences and light field research, developing interoperable media formats and media-aware network processing for volumetric content through the Immersive Digital Experiences Alliance. Debbie has a BS degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Kansas and a Master’s in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University, and was recognized as the WICT Rocky Mountain Woman In Technology in 2012.

Dr. Belal Hamzeh is the Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at CableLabs; a non-profit R&D organization funded by the global cable industry for the development of technologies and specifications for the secure delivery of high-speed data, video, voice and next generation services. In this position, Belal leads CableLabs’ long-term technology vision and plays a key role in driving new technology innovations critical to the cable industry’s evolution across Wired (HFC and Optical), Wireless, Network Convergence and Security Technologies.

Most recently, Belal led CableLabs’ wireless R&D activities across fixed, mobile and emerging wireless technologies in addition to leading the technology development for the DOCSIS 3.1 and Full Duplex DOCSIS^® technologies. Prior to joining CableLabs, he led R&D efforts for 3G/4G technologies including technology and product development, certification and network deployments.

Belal holds a Master of Science and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Penn State University along with multiple issued and pending patents.

As Vice President of Wired Technologies at CableLabs, Curtis and his team are responsible for specifying scalable deployment solutions in both HFC and all-fiber access networks for CableLabs member companies. DOCSIS® technologies, Full Duplex DOCSIS, Distributed CCAP Architectures, and Point-to-Point Coherent Optics are a few current high priority projects underway and led by members of the Wired Technologies team. Prior to joining CableLabs, Curtis led an engineering team at Harmonic, Inc. to develop the world’s first CMTS-in-a-node and Ethernet-switch-in-a-node, both solutions representing the first instantiation of what today is called deep fiber Distributed Access Architecture solutions for the cable industry. Currently, Curtis is also the Chair of the IEEE 802.3ca 50G-EPON Task Force, helping to usher in the first 50Gb/s PON solution.

Curtis holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of New Mexico, and an M.S. and B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Colorado State University.

Randy Levensalor is a lead architect at CableLabs, a non-profit research & development lab funded by the global cable industry. As a principal member of the Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) team, he is responsible for creating the NFV infrastructure reference platform and progressing orchestration capabilities based on service providers’ needs. Randy also leads the Software Defined Networking NFV Application development Platform and Stack project, or SNAPS^®, a CableLabs initiative to accelerate and ease the adoption of network virtualization.

Prior to joining CableLabs, Randy gained extensive experience leading R&D, DevOps, and product management across several Hewlett-Packard divisions focusing on successfully delivering its public cloud, Linux and converged management solutions.

Randy is actively involved in OPNFV, OpenStack and OpenDaylight and contributes to key industry standardization efforts including ETSI NFV. A subject matter expert, he has spoken on a broad range of topics at several conferences including the Open Networking Summit, OpenStack Summit, OPNFV Summit, Big Communications, SCTE Cable Tech Expo, NFV World Congress, SDN World Congress, Linux Conference Australia, Automation Everywhere and many more. Randy holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from Virginia Tech.

Bernie McKibben is a Distinguished Technologist at CableLabs who brings innovative wireless solutions to customers. His recent focus areas include emerging 5G technologies, LTE, Carrier Wi-Fi, small cells and low power WAN technologies. He also has experience in real time communications systems over wireless networks. Bernie has been active in leading industry forums such as 3GPP, WFA, WBA and the MFA. He has been a speaker and panelist at major industry conferences. Bernie holds 20 issued patents in wireless communications.

Joey is a Distinguished Technologist for Wireless at CableLabs and has been recently focused on projects that converge wired and wireless networks. Joey’s background spans multiple wired and wireless technologies such as DOCSIS, Wi-Fi, and LTE with a primary focus on PHY and MAC layers, and inter-system coexistence. He also has extensive experience in practical application of theory, leading lab and development teams responsible for implementing and/or testing a variety of network related technologies. Joey holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering with a focus on signal processing, both from University of Colorado.

Dr. Jason Rupe got his Ph.D. a long time ago, conducting research on large scale systems and networks for reliability and performance modeling. He taught quality control, reliability, and even a few software and electronics courses at various universities. He has worked at USWEST Advanced Technologies, Qwest Communications, Polar Star Consulting, Tenica, and as an independent consultant to the IEEE. In these companies, he has had titles including technical staff, senior technical staff, and director; but he has always been the companies’ expert on reliability and quality. In these roles, he has been able to design or help design several networks for the government and private sector, assure broadband deployments are profitable and reliable, design solutions that meet targeted service level agreements, design and test network solutions for high reliability, and invent a few cool things too. He is heavily involved in the IEEE, in various roles at conferences, on the IEEE Reliability Society ExCom (elected), as a co-chair for the IEEE Blockchain Initiative, and as chair of IEEE Denver Section. Currently, he is the Principal Architect for Proactive Network Maintenance at CableLabs, where he is the champion for all opportunities to help the industry improve service reliability for the cable industry. He holds a couple patents, and is working on a bunch more.

Dr. Thomas Sandholm is a Principal Architect at CableLabs who currently focuses on research in the area of Artificial Intelligence in Wi-Fi networks.

He has made research and open-source contributions in a wide range of AI and distributed systems domains in the past, including market-based resource allocation, location-aware recommender systems, smart appliances, Web-based video conferencing, and distributed file systems. Prior to joining CableLabs, a bit less than two years ago, Thomas held various engineering leadership, research and software architect positions at startups, IT-companies, research labs, and universities.

Jon Schnoor is a Lead Architect for CableLabs’ Wired Technologies team, focused on the Distributed CCAP Architecture (DCA) Program, including Remote PHY (R-PHY) and Flexible MAC Architecture (FMA) technologies. He leads the R-PHY and FMA projects developing specifications, solutions and championing the cable industry toward Distributed Access Architectures of the future. Jon works closely with cable operators and technology partners to develop and deliver new innovative concepts, designs and strategic initiatives for the cable industry.

Prior to joining CableLabs, Jon was Director of Advanced Solutions Engineering for Ubee Interactive’s Advanced Wireless Gateway Organization. In his role he provided high-level engineering support for customers, direction for the Advanced Solutions Engineering team, facilitated new business development initiatives and supported product management in defining requirements for new cable technologies with customers.

Previous to Ubee Interactive, he was Director of Technical Marketing at Hitachi Communications helping lead the cable industry’s effort with EPON and the DPoE specification. He was a contributing engineer with the DPoE group at CableLabs helping to develop the industry’s first fiber homerun requirements.

With more than 25 years of experience in the cable and telecommunications industry, Jon spent a majority of his career in the operator space with various engineering groups. At Comcast, he helped design, test and deploy their provisioning and CPE support systems. Jon led voice deployments across markets for Charter Communications, including field network readiness and provisioning and was the technical lead for the Charter Home Networking product line.

Luther Smith is the Director, Wireless Access Technologies and Principal Architect at CableLabs. While Luther’s current focus is within the Wireless technology, Luther has experience in many Wired, and Video technologies. Over Luther’s 18 years at CableLabs, his roles have extended from testing and specification development to leading the Wireless Access Team. Luther currently serves as Lead or Co-Lead in varies working groups in the WBA and CBRS-A and well participates in working groups in CBRS-A, WInnForum, WBA and WFA. Luther holds a Master of Information Systems and MBA in Technical Management from the University of Phoenix.  Luther is ISC² CISSP certified and a member of the SCTE and IEEE.

Tony G. Werner serves as President of Technology and Product for Comcast Cable. In this role, he is responsible for overseeing all aspects of the Technology and Product organization, including innovation, development and operations. The Technology and Product team leads the design and development of Comcast’s world-class customer-facing products, including the X1 Entertainment Operating System, second-screen apps, and ultra-fast home Internet and Wi-Fi. The organization also leads software development, systems engineering, next-generation access networks, cloud computing, technical operations and R&D within Comcast.

Under Tony’s leadership, Comcast has completed major platform developments, including DOCSIS 3.0, the Digital terminal Adapter/all-digital transition and the X1 platform. Today the company is delivering product innovation faster than ever before. In 2015, Comcast became the first company to connect a gigabit-class DOCSIS 3.1 modem on a customer-facing network.

The Technology and Product organization also designs and builds new X1 features like Kids Zone, the Sports App and X1 Voice Remote.

Prior to joining Comcast in 2006, Tony served as Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for Liberty Global, Inc., in Englewood, CO, where he led the company’s global strategy for video, voice and data services. He has more than 25 years of engineering and technical management experience, having also held senior management positions with Qwest Communications, Aurora Networks, TeleCommunications, Inc. (TCI)/AT&T Broadband, Rogers Communications, Inc., and RCA Cablevision Systems.

Tony serves as President and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) Foundation (2015-16 term).

A graduate of Dakota County Technical College in Rosemount, MN with a degree in Telecommunications, Tony resides in Philadelphia.