In January, Mediacom lit up the first major leg of what will become a nearly company-wide implementation of the new high-speed data specification. Today Walden is the main technology architect behind a watershed initiative that puts Mediacom ahead of any other cable company in deploying what some believe is the broadband platform of the future: DOCSIS 3.1. Maybe so, but a commitment to the leading edge of information technology now looks to be paying off big. Walden’s self-effacing reflection nearly 30 years later: “I was a nerd.” While his high-school buddies were flipping burgers at fast-food restaurants, Walden had a high-level security clearance at NAWS, where he spent weekends troubleshooting programs written in Fortran.
Ridgecrest is also where Mediacom’s Chief Technology Officer JR Walden grew up as a teen, teaching himself how to write software in the Pascal and C programming languages on a Commodore 64 computer. But there’s another, lesser-known tie-in. The fact that Ridgecrest has a special place in Mediacom lore is well-documented.
In 1996, a former banking executive named Rocco Commisso bought the cable system serving Ridgecrest, launching a company that eventually would grow to serve more than 1.4 million cable TV customers. Census Bureau, 46 percent of the roughly 5,000 residents have earned a post-secondary degree.įor Mediacom Communications, the town has special significance. It’s a place where brainiacs rule: In one Ridgecrest neighborhood tracked by the U.S. has a singular claim to fame: It flanks the sprawling Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake (or NAWS), where engineers and scientists spend their days testing airborne weapons used by the U.S. The Mojave Desert town of Ridgecrest, Calif. Read on to learn how Mediacom became the first cable company to make a footprint-wide commitment to DOCSIS 3.1. For the article below, Mediacom’s CTO JR Walden visited with Stewart Schley for Broadband Library to recount in detail the behind-the-scenes decisions that led to a historic moment in cable’s broadband progression. The company’s “Project Gigabit” ultimately will make gigabit-per-second connectivity available throughout virtually the entirety of Mediacom’s 22-state footprint. The Inside Story From JR Walden In January 2017, Mediacom Communications drew back the curtain on the cable industry’s largest DOCSIS ® 3.1 implementation to date.