Cambridge Cable

~ the obituary ~

In September 1994 the first ten households in Cambridge were connected to an experiment that ran ATM into the living room, two megabits per second in each direction, terminated at a wall socket with a set top box plugged into it over a length of UTP cable. Four years later I got online for the first time in Turkey on a 14.4k modem, which is about a hundred and forty times slower in one direction and nothing like two megabits in the other. The gap this grave is written across is that number.

Cambridge Cable Ltd was founded in 1988 by three Cambridge businessmen to sell cable television and telephone service. It won the franchise for the city and the surrounding area in June 1989, and in July 1990 the Department of Trade and Industry licensed it to run a public telecommunications service and push television channels down the same underground network. Television came first, in July 1991. The telephone service followed in September 1992.

The money came from outside. Comcast Corporation and Singapore Telecom both backed it, and by 1996 Comcast owned the whole thing. With that balance sheet behind it the company bought Stort Valley Cable in November 1992 and took the Harlow franchise, trading there as Anglia Cable Communications, then lit its East Coast Cable franchise in late 1993 with Colchester first and Ipswich behind it. By the end it was running four regional brands over one network.

That is the boring half. The reason to remember the company is that for about two years its ducts carried a working digital interactive television service, in an industry that was otherwise still describing one in press releases.

~ the case file ~

~ the curbside ~

The trial ran on ATM end to end, and that detail still reads strangely. ATM switches sat in Online Media's Cambridge offices, wired to server machines and file stores from ICL. Fibre at 100 and 155 Mbps ran from there to Cambridge Cable's headend. From the headend, dedicated 155 Mbps fibres fed further ATM switches in the curbside cabinets, and from each leaf cabinet a star of baseband coax went out to the homes. Cambridge Cable's contribution was physical: the power distribution and the holes already in the ground, with none of its own cable television or telephone equipment anywhere in the path.

The box at the end had an ARM processor and an MPEG decompression chipset. Online Media, which built it, was an Acorn subsidiary, and the first model was made in small numbers. The infrastructure consortium was Online Media and Advanced Telecommunications Modules alongside Cambridge Cable, with ICL and SJ Research on the rest of it. Phase one began in September 1994 with ten connected users. Phase two started in March 1995, and by January 1996 the number of connected sites was approaching one hundred.

~ what was on the box ~

The service list is what dates the whole thing, because every item on it is something people now do and nobody then could. You could bank through the television with National Westminster Bank, and pull news and weather on demand from Anglia Television and ITN. The on-screen guide let you play the trailers from inside it, and behind that sat an archive of comedies and documentaries that started when you asked rather than when they were scheduled. The BBC was in the service consortium, as was Tesco, and IPC Magazines, and the Independent Television Commission sat in there too, watching what a regulator would eventually have to think about.

The trial headquarters were in Online Media's offices rather than the cable company's, which tells you how the labor divided. Cambridge Cable supplied the street and the holes in it, and the consortium around it supplied everything that made the street interesting.

~ who ate it ~

Wikipedia says the Cambridge Cable Group became part of NTL on 2 June 1999. NTL's own annual report for 1998, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on 31 March 1999, already lists Cambridge Cable Limited and Cambridge Cable Services Limited among its subsidiaries, two months before that. The date that holds up is in the same filing: on 29 October 1998, a wholly owned subsidiary of NTL amalgamated with Comcast UK Cable Partners Limited, which held 100 percent of Cambridge Holding Company Limited. Partners shareholders received 0.3745 NTL shares each, about 18,764,000 shares in total.

After that the brands came off one by one while the network kept working, the usual ending for a cable franchise. It is NTL inside Virgin Media now. The trial is documented at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory by two of the people who built it, and reading it is like finding a set of blueprints for a house everybody else got around to building fifteen years later.

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