Fourteen Additional Cable Modems Gain CableLabs® Certified™ Status

CableLabs® announced recently that it has awarded CableLabs® Certified™ cable modem status to 14 modems, including five more plug-and-play universal serial bus (USB) modems.

Companies MASPRO Denkoh, Ol’E and Saejin are new suppliers to receive certified status. Eight other companies—3Com, Arris, Askey, Com21, Future Networks, Thomson Consumer Electronics, Terayon (three modems), and Toshiba (two modems)—were re-certified. In addition, another cable modem termination system (CMTS) from Cisco Systems was qualified—Cisco previously had a CMTS qualified.

These announcements mean that 36 companies now have achieved certified status for more than 90 cable high-speed data devices. Included in this ever increasing array of certified cable modems are two PCI modems, which are built inside personal computers by manufacturers. There are a total of five companies with qualified CMTS.

The USB modems are from 3Com, Arris, Thomson, one from Terayon and one from Toshiba. The USB connection is being built into the majority of computers that are being shipped today. The connection in a modem allows consumers to plug an always-connected cable modem into their computer's USB connection without requiring a separate Ethernet card.

Certified modems are identifiable by a "CableLabs® Certified™" seal. This seal informs consumers and cable operators that a modem complies with the CableLabs’ cable modem specification. It also assures that it will communicate (interoperate) with qualified CMTSs, which are being deployed worldwide.

There are numerous deployments by cable operators on their broadband networks using cable modem products from the more than one dozen companies producing CableLabs® Certified™ cable modems. The cable industry has created a complete retail certification standard in its data modem program from a standing start four years ago.

A Certification Review Board, comprised of representatives of CableLabs member companies, grants certification status to DOCSIS™-compliant modems, and qualified status to headend equipment, based on lab tests completed by CableLabs as well as on field data. Certification to this point has focused solely on DOCSIS 1.0 products.

The effort has achieved widespread cable and vendor consensus on a series of definitions of key interconnection points in a cable data distribution network. It also has achieved North American (by the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers) and international (by the International Telecommunications Union) standardization using key elements of DOCSIS.