Cox Vet Jay Rolls Named Charter's CTO

Cable engineering vet Jay Rolls has been named SVP and chief technology officer of Charter Communications Inc. , succeeding Marwan Fawaz, who left the MSO in March. (See Charter's CTO Resigns.)

Rolls joins Charter from Cox Communications Inc. , where he was serving as SVP of technology, and reports to Don Detampel, Charter's EVP of technology and president of commercial services. At Charter, Rolls will lead the MSO's engineering and architecture teams and serve as the primary liaison to industry organizations, including CableLabs .

Rolls is late of BBN Communications, Alcatel Telecom, Pacific Broadband (a cable modem terminations system startup) and Excite@Home, the now-defunct MSO-owned ISP.

Light Reading Cable caught up with Rolls at last year's Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) Cable-Tec Expo in New Orleans to discuss Cox's interest in upstream channel bonding and the MSO's bandwidth-boosting options, which included a move to 1GHz.

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Why this matters
The addition of Rolls, a well-respected cable vet, brings long-term cable engineering leadership to Charter, which has been operating without a permanent CTO for about four months. Chris Bowick, the former CTO of Cox, has been serving as Charter's interim CTO.

Rolls is also coming on board as Charter starts to move ahead rapidly with service and technology initiatives -- including TV Everywhere and a possible flirtation with an IP video migration -- following its emergence from bankruptcy in November 2009. (See Charter Leaves Chapter 11 .)

For more
Read more about what Charter's been up to lately.

— Jeff Baumgartner, Site Editor, Light Reading Cable