The next time frustration swells as your Comcast On Demand takes its sweet time loading a movie, think about what, exactly, goes into playing it.
Or ask Michael Cantrell, supervisor of Comcast’s regional master headend facility, the main distribution center for all of Comcast’s products in the area: phone, video, high-speed Internet and video On Demand. The 24/7 facility serves Chicago, its suburbs, northwest Indiana and southwest Michigan.
He works out of a renovated car dealership that sits among operating dealerships and empty lots in Chicago’s Gage Park neighborhood, in an office where car salesmen most likely arranged financing for buyers. His walls are plain white, the chairs mismatched. An unused desk sits across from his, and two glass block windows shed muted light on his workspace. His only computer is a laptop, which sits on top of a blotter-style desk calendar.
Surprisingly, though his job centers on cable products, he has no TV in his office. Too distracting, he said. But the Spartan office is no matter to Cantrell, who spends only about four hours a day there making conference calls, doing paperwork or meeting with any of the 10 technicians whom he oversees.
“My door is always open to the guys,” Cantrell said. “Come in and talk anytime.”
The rest of the day, Cantrell is out and about in his facility or any of the other five facilities that he oversees, doing video “picture checks” and status checks on his product services.
“It’s just like when you’re at home, you have to walk through each room just to see how everything is and everything’s in place,” Cantrell said. “I’m keeping tabs and making sure things are getting done under Comcast’s standards.”
The 25,000-square-foot facility is broken into three parts: the advanced services room, the largest of the three and the operating center for high-speed Internet, telephone services and video On Demand; the original master headend, the operating center for video services and high-definition and standard-definition channels; and a power room, which keeps it all running around the clock.
At first glance, most of the facility looks like neatly bundled multicolored wires running between libraryesque rows of stacked cable boxes. Each color represents a Comcast product (for instance purple transfers video On Demand data, while orange is for high-speed Internet), and feeds into nodes on the back of cable boxes. It’s akin to what you have at home, with each node feeding data to 400 to 1,200 customers.
“If I took all the cable I’ve got in the original master headend and the advanced services facility, I could go to Las Vegas with it and come back, go to Las Vegas and come back and probably go to Las Vegas and come back,” Cantrell said. “That’s a lot of cable.” Particularly considering the trip is about 1,800 miles one way.
Twelve satellite dishes of varying sizes dot the facility’s backyard. Comcast still uses satellites to receive data but switched distribution to “fibers” (fiber optics) about 10 years ago for faster, better service. A plane flying overhead from nearby Midway Airport doesn’t interfere with fibers as it would with satellite transmissions.
Inside the facility, temperature is an issue because the equipment is powered by a large amount of direct current. Cantrell said they have to keep the room at 68 degrees.
“You don’t realize how much heat (this equipment) puts out,” Cantrell said.
Or how loud the air conditioners necessary to keep it cool are. They make it hard to catch every word of the technical lingo — HSI (high-speed Internet), CDV (Comcast Digital Voice telephone services), RF (black coaxial cables) — Cantrell tosses around on the job he has done for more than 11 years.
For him, it’s all in a day’s work, as is responding to any emergency page or phone call, day or night, when power or service is out. While Comcast has built redundancy — an extra generator and backup cables — into its operation, accidents happen.
The fibers have streamlined Comcast’s emergency-notification system. In the past, an on-duty employee would have paged Cantrell when he or she realized there was a problem. Now, the system handles it instantaneously.
Cantrell said his crew will handle most things but contacts him if “anything major” happens. In the last year, he’s been called four or five times, he said.
“I could be at home sleeping, 2 o’clock in the morning, my phone could go off; you get used to it after so many years,” Cantrell said. “Your body just (reacts). It’s like from the old days, from the pagers and the vibrations. I don’t put anything on vibrate now — it’s all on some kind of ring tone — but sometimes my hip still vibrates, thinking I’m getting a page.”
For a photo gallery of Cantrell’s workspace, visit chicagotribune.com/cantrell
