Four More DOCSIS® 2.0 Modems Gain CableLabs® Certified™ Status

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CableLabs announced recently that another four DOCSIS® 2.0 cable modems had achieved certification status during Certification Wave 26 that has just concluded. CableLabs also announced that eight companies gained certified status for DOCSIS 1.1 products and two companies gained DOCSIS 1.0 certification. One company obtained DOCSIS 1.1 qualified status for headend equipment.

DOCSIS 2.0 modems from Terayon, Texas Instruments and Thomson were certified. There are now a total of 22 DOCSIS 2.0 modems that have been certified.

DOCSIS 2.0 gives cable operators the ability to offer speeds up to 600 times faster than are available through standard dial-up telephone modems. DOCSIS 2.0 is backward compatible with earlier versions of DOCSIS products, fully supporting advanced Internet Protocol (IP)-based cable services. It adds advanced digital modulation capabilities to cable modems and headend equipment enabling cable companies to increase, by a factor of three, the speed of the return (or upstream) path of their networks as compared to DOCSIS 1.1, or a factor of six as compared to DOCSIS 1.0.

"This is great news for our industry. We truly could not have had this kind of accomplishment so quickly without the help of a great community of supplying companies and the strong support of the cable operators," said CableLabs Broadband Access Vice President and Chief Architect Ralph Brown who heads the project. "We will continue our push to add to our family of DOCSIS specifications as new technologies warrant," Brown added.

There are now 410 cable high-speed Internet access devices that have received certification or qualification status in the last three and a half years of CableLabs testing. DOCSIS 1.0 modems were optimized for high-speed Internet access. DOCSIS 2.0 is backward compatible with DOCSIS 1.1, which opens a technological doorway to augmented revenue streams for cable providers by enabling the existence of high-speed Internet service tiers, via techniques known as data fragmentation and concatenation. Those techniques allow cable providers to deliver high-speed Internet services simultaneously over the same plant with guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS).

And, perhaps most importantly, equipment built to comply with the DOCSIS 1.1 specification becomes the foundation for expanding the list of advanced IP-based cable services offered by cable providers, including home networking through the CableLabs CableHome™ project, and packet telephony and multimedia services through the CableLabs PacketCable™ project.

As of Certification Wave 26, a total of 355 DOCSIS modems have received certification, including 96 1.1 modems; 55 cable modem termination systems (CMTSs) have gained qualified status, including 26 1.1 CMTSs. Eleven modems received DOCSIS 1.1 certification in Wave 26 from Ambit, Belkin, Castlenet, Cisco, Linksys, Motorola, SMC, and Toshiba; and one CMTS from Arris.

Receiving DOCSIS 1.0 certification in Wave 26 were Scientific-Atlanta and Thomson.

As part of Certification Wave 26, CableLabs once again performed three parallel practice certification runs for equipment built to support CableHome 1.0, DOCSIS 2.0, and PacketCable 1.0. The vendor community is using the results of the practice run to refine their upcoming products that will be submitted for future certification waves.

Results of PacketCable™ and CableHome™ certification and qualification testing are available on the CableLabs Web site under the Certification & Qualification area.

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