Throwing together a panel of operators and vendors is always a recipe for a well-balanced discussion, but nothing beats a vendor telling an operator how it is. Tempers were close to boiling over on the topic of certification during a session at Cable Congress 2019, as a vendor – which by its own admission was out of place at a cable event – declared “stop buying uncertified products.” As highlighted in last week’s issue, convergence between cable and mobile was an important topic in Berlin. It was therefore fitting for US telco equipment supplier Ciena to have a place on a distributed access architecture (DAA) panel and it was even more appropriate that the vendor had the loudest voice. Ciena’s…