CableLabs Putting Increased Focus on Long-Term Tech Development, CEO McKinney Says

CableLabs' funding of various projects is increasingly focused on the long term, with "investment in innovation projects focused on three to eight years as being of equal importance to our traditional R&D projects focused on one to three years," CEO Phil McKinney said in a blog post Friday. Those long-range innovation projects will be the source for future R&D work, he said: "While most organizations spend a small portion of their budget on longer range innovation, we’ve made the deliberate decision to be aggressive in this transformation to ensure that CableLabs can rapidly build and sustain a significant innovation pipeline for the industry." McKinney said that since his start there in 2012, CableLabs also has focused on speeding up its R&D work, with an example being certification the first DOCSIS 3.1 modems announced earlier this week (see 1601130013). "We delivered DOCSIS 3.1 in record time, especially considering the new technologies that were added," he said.