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OpenStack. In computing, and especially distributed computing, it’s a staple, in conversation and in workflow. People tend to elevator-pitch it as “an open operating system for the cloud,” “Linux on steroids,” and “a framework based around open source software.”

As one software aficionado put it: “It’s a bunch of scripts (translation: instructions) that help create clouds and virtual machines to deploy file systems and storage and a bunch of other stuff.”

Getting clearer? Here’s more. It started in July of 2010 as a collaborative project between NASA and Rackspace, with a goal of making it easier to use regular, off-the-shelf computing hardware to handle public and private cloud activities.

Last month, Time Warner Cable posted a tech blog titled “One Year Later: Setting Up OpenStack at TWC,” penned by its lead “stacker,” Matt Haines (real title: VP, Cloud Engineering and Ops.) In it, he describes how his agile team “designed and deployed an enterprise-grade cloud,” using OpenStack, in its two national data centers.

Comcast began its OpenStack cloud work three years ago, in 2012, to support its X1 rollout — navigation first, then apps, and now video (it’s what’s behind “cloud DVR.”)

Both providers settled on OpenStack as an alternative to buying proprietary set-tops, control components, and servers from the same company. Troubleshooting gets easier, they submit. Rolling out new services, features and bug-fixes gets (way, way) faster.

It’s worth pointing out here that the long-held industrial fears about open anything are rapidly melting away. No longer are concerns about mad coders “doing harm to the network” a definitive reason to not take an open source route.

More, the tech mantra today is one of “disrupt, or be disrupted.”

The vendor community, always in a weird spot when their customers decide to lean toward “build” vs. “buy,” is following suit. Cisco, during the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show, heavily emphasized its investment in, and development of, Openstack-based components for multichannel video providers.

It follows that OpenStack is behind all the tech talk about “transparency,” and the tales about how this-or-that was about to go kaflooey, but because they had visibility into the software (which always comes in “stacks”), they fixed it (in hours, not months), averting disaster. Anecdotes like this abound in OpenStack speak.

Everything about OpenStack is open, even how papers are vetted for its annual conferences, which attract around 5,000 attendees, twice a year, for five days. (The “stackers” met in Atlanta and Paris last year.) For the Paris confab, in November, 1,100 papers were submitted for consideration (by contrast, cable’s tech events typically attract around 300 papers, vetted by committee.) The entire OpenStack community voted on who spoke.

As “open” stuff goes, OpenStack is decidedly one to know. They meet again in Vancouver, from May 18-22; on any given day, regional groups host meet-ups all over the world. Time to get your stack on.

This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichannel News.

PHILADELPHIA–It was a full-on Wi-Fi binge at the Philly Tech It Out program here on 8/21, with one common refrain: When it comes to Wi-Fi, we’re still in the very, very early stages.

“We know it’s new and nifty, and know it adds value, but where it’s going to go is anybody’s bet,” said morning keynoter Ken Falkenstein, VP/Wireless Technology for Comcast. He added, for the benefit of the appreciable student presence: “You will have a marvelous career trying to get rid of the wires.”

Other highlights of the “Wi-Fi Everywhere” day, put on by the Philadelphia chapter of Women In Cable & Telecommunications:

Greyhound’s decision on its 100^th anniversary to put Wi-Fi spigots throughout its short-term rides reversed what had been the company’s smallest earner — and they can thank the millennial generation for it. “They gave us something we think we should have,” said Blaire Ballin, a senior at Ramapo College and Comcast summer intern.

Speaking of millennials: They’re a demanding bunch. Earlier this summer, she accidentally over-ran her data plan. Yes, she could’ve paid for more. But then again: “I have a hard time understanding that I have to pay for anything. Luxuries should just be there.”

(Just to bring your eyebrows back down: This same young woman also led a project that enabled a community of Guatemalan women to sell their woven goods over Wi-Fi.)

Sexy Wi-Fi numbers: Comcast expects to light up 8 million Wi-Fi “homespots” by year-end, calling the decision to install boxes comprised of both cable modem and Wi-Fi radio “the hockey stick moment.”

Time Warner Cable’s Wi-Fi footprint supports 17 million sessions per month; about a fifth of them come in from roaming partners, like Boingo. (Last summer, Time Warner was the first U.S. operator to partner with Boingo on Wi-Fi roaming — industrially known as HotSpot 2.0, with a consumer brand of Passpoint.)

The city’s regional rail line supports about 270,000 Wi-Fi sessions per month, with a load of 2.5 Terabytes of data transfer, said Bill Zebrowski, Senior Director of Information Technology for SEPTA, who quipped: “That’s a lot of Walking Dead.”

At the 2014 World Cup, in Brazil, 30% of the people sitting in the 241,033-seat Maracana Stadium got a connectivity fix over Wi-Fi, moving 5.6 terabytes of data over 217 access points, noted executives from Ruckuss Wireless.

Crazy stuff that’s coming: Wi-Fi that recharges your batteries. (What!?) Well, sort of. It’s called “wireless backscatter,” and is in the academic stages now as a way to make battery-less the sensors of the Internet of Things.

In closing: Focusing on one tech subject for an entire day takes guts! It worked. Kudos, WICT Philadelphia, for an outstanding event.

This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichannel News.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—As expected, “cloud,” Gigabit services and the Reference Design Kit (“RDK”) led the tech headlines at this year’s Cable Show. Given that you’ve likely read plenty about them by now, this week’s translation will drop in on the rest of the tech scene.

Starting with some big news that tucked in to the last day of this year’s show: A deal between Time Warner Cable and Samsung for HDTVs that come with the TWC TV application built-in. No box.

Strategically, it means that owners of the Samsung sets, who live in Time Warner Cable territory, will see the MSO’s services on “both inputs” – one and two. Meaning, whether the viewer is looking at “input one,” where “regular cable” plugs in (read: HDMI), or at “input two,” where the TV connects to IP over Ethernet or Wi-Fi, they’re seeing TWC services.

Note: Several news reports said that people who buy the TV will be able to “download” the TWC TV app. Yet, few of the connected TVs in the marketplace yet offer a “download” feature. None of the connected Samsung devices (TV, blu-ray DVD) in my little OTT video lab do. It’s more likely that the TWC TV app will show up in a negotiated section of screen within Samsung’s “walled garden” of apps.

Just as you can “see” the TWC TV on screens attached to Roku 3 streamers, the app can’t be accessed unless it is “behind” a Time Warner Cable-provisioned cable modem or gateway. That way, the viewer’s login can be checked against the MAC (media access control) address of the modem. Having a login isn’t enough. (Found THAT out.)

Another palpable tech trend at this year’s show: Wi-Fi. Right here, at the mid-point of 2013, cable-delivered Wi-Fi is spraying bits from about 200,000 outdoor hotspots. That makes cable the largest Wi-Fi provider in the U.S.

But in all likelihood, cable’s Wi-Fi footprint will expand by an order of magnitude, if Comcast has its way. At the Show, it announced plans for “neighborhood hotspots,” which works by turning existing, Wi-Fi-equipped cable modems into hot spots.

At an Imagine Park session here last Wednesday, Comcast CTO Tony Werner said that means millions and ultimately tens of millions of devices, after a firmware upgrade.

Here’s how it works: Say you have broadband service through a Comcast cable modem or wireless gateway. That device came to you with two SSIDs  — service set identifiers. That’s what populates the list of names of available WiFi hot spots, when you’re looking for signal.

One of them, of course, is whatever yours is called. The other – partitioned such that it can’t see or mess with your traffic on the other — will presumably say “xfinity Wi-Fi.” (Sadly, Comcast’s WiFi momentum hasn’t reached Denver yet.)

The technique of turning home equipment into hot spots isn’t unique to Comcast – overseas operators who can’t get workable access to aerial plant, to place WiFi radios, like it too. Telenet, in Belgium, is one example, as is Liberty Global.

So for those reasons, it just seems like 200,000 cable-delivered WiFi hot spots is going to seem real puny real soon.

Lastly: I purchased this year’s batch of tech papers (I now have 25 sets, go figure), and spent a few moments looking for the masterpieces of tech-talk. A later column will pluck out the informational dandies, but just in terms of gibberish, this year’s hands-down winner goes to Patricio Latini and Ayham Al-Banna, of Arris. Their paper: “A Simple Approach for Deriving the Symbol Error Rate of Non-Rectangular 2^2k+1 M-ary AMPM Modulation.”

Simple!

This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichannel News.

Louis Williamson, VP of Advanced Engineering for Time Warner Cable (and, as an aside, the guy who figured out how to move video over fiber optic cable in the mid-1980s), takes us on a walking tour of the company’s internal headend. Directed and produced by the fabulous David Knappe with equally fabulous Joe Bondulich on camera and lighting. Directed and produced by the fabulous David Knappe with equally fabulous Joe Bondulich on camera and lighting.

Video courtesy Multichannel News.

Louis Williamson, VP of Advanced Engineering for Time Warner Cable (and, as an aside, the guy who figured out how to move video over fiber optic cable in the mid-1980s) explains new technologies developed home networking capabilities. TWC’s new set top boxes and (code named) “Santa Monica” design converge products and information, so that viewers can link all content in the house, and access it from the TV, or the PC, or the handheld. Directed and produced by the fabulous David Knappe with equally fabulous Joe Bondulich on camera and lighting.

Video courtesy Multichannel News.

Dave Bell, Chief Architect for Time Warner Cable ATG West, explains “version tracking” software developed to help the MSO organize its enterprise software and check outgoing client and server codes for MDN (Mystro Digital Navigator) and ODN (OCAP Digital Navigator) products. Directed and produced by the fabulous David Knappe with equally fabulous Joe Bondulich on camera and lighting.

Video courtesy Multichannel News.

In this concluding segment with ATG East EVP Jim Ludington, we talk about where things are going — from multiple connected devices to EBIF, and what vendors can do to make life easier. Produced by the fabulous David Knappe with equally fabulous Joe Bondulich on camera and lighting.

Video courtesy Multichannel News.

How does a company deal with the software integration workload on a growing volume of new technology deployments? As the integration matrix expands, it’s important to replicate environments in the field, says ATG East EVP Jim Ludington. In this segment, Ludington emphasizes the importance of testing and tweaking before products to to the field. Produced by the fabulous David Knappe with equally fabulous Joe Bondulich on camera and lighting.

Video courtesy Multichannel News.

Time Warner Cable’s east-coast Advanced Technology Group is located in in Charlotte, N.C. In this series, three top ATG East execs take us through the facility, which focuses on quality assurance testing — making everything work right, before it goes to market. We begin with Jim Ludington, EVP of ATG East, who describes the video testing that takes place here, and why resolving “integration issues” are core to cable’s cross-platform future. He also delves into how all the ATG facilities work and link together. Directed and produced by the fabulous David Knappe with equally fabulous Joe Bondulich on camera and lighting.

Video courtesy Multichannel News.

Senior Software Engineer Phu Duc Nguyen discusses what it takes to offer “remote DVR” features to subscription video customers. Forgot to pick up the remote to set a series record on a favorite show? Do it from your laptop or mobile device tomorrow — regardless of where you may be. Produced by the fabulous David Knappe with equally fabulous Joe Bondulich on camera and lighting.

Video courtesy Multichannel News.