John B. Terry

Biography

John B. (Jack) Terry was born on August 20, 1937 in Woodford, England. While at college and as a student apprentice at The Marconi Company in England, he provided leadership in television transmission and production within charitable and club organizations.

Mr. Terry's professional career in television began in 1959. For a number of years he was involved in development, field installation and training in areas of high and low power TV Broadcast transmitters, as well as studio equipment and microwave links. This work took him to a number of places in Europe, Africa and South America. In 1965, Mr. Terry initiated and led much of the PCM telephony transmission development work at Marconi, resulting in the first UK field trial of a PCM telephony multiplex product. This digital telephony work later expanded into PBX and exchange system design.

Mr. Terry emigrated to Canada in 1974 to join Bell Northern Research (BNR) and assume managerial and technical responsibility for the hardware design of Northern Telecom's DMS-100 central office switch product. While doing this, he also lead teams and exploited technology to create new frontiers in telephony line circuits and electrical integrity in digital exchange systems. Over 50 million line circuits based on this work are today in service in North America. During the 1980s, Mr. Terry's switching work evolved to Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) switch architecture and technology research, a new loop system technique termed Service Adaptive Access and to optical fiber based broadband access systems.

Early in 1991, Mr. Terry resumed his career in the field of television, in this case digital television and related multimedia. In July of 1991, he was appointed Assistant Vice-President at BNR to head up a broadband systems and technology research laboratory in Ottawa, whose activities were focused on "Fiber-to-the-Coax" transmission technologies and systems.

During 1992 and 1993, Mr. Terry worked with cable TV network technical executives to evolve strategies and network architectures for coaxial cable delivery of advanced services. This work led to acceptance of new ways of exploiting cable spectrum and achieving transmission robustness plus service security. As a result of these activities, in February 1995, Mr. Terry transferred to BNR's parent company, Northern Telecom, in Atlanta to head up broadband systems, architectures and technology activities and to be within easier reach of US cable customers.

Mr. Terry's professional activities have included: IEEE Ottawa Section Engineering Management Society Chapter Chair (1983-89); Chair, new IEEE COMSOC/Society of Cable Television Engineers (SCTE)Joint Technical Committee (1993); Co-General Chair of IEEE Broadband '95 workshop (January 1995).

Mr. Terry is a Fellow of the IEEE, and a member of SCTE and Sigma XI. He received the 1994 IEEE Ottawa "Pioneer of the Valley" Award. Within BNR, he received the President's 1991 Individual Award for Teamwork and, in 1993, an Innovation Leadership award. He has presented papers at numerous conferences and holds patents covering a wide range of subjects.

Jack Terry and his wife Dorothy resided in Cumming, Georgia. Their outside interests included touring in their travel trailer, riding their two horses, and sailing Jack's home (African) made cabin sailboat.