CableLabs® Achieves Industry 'First' With Certification for DOCSIS™ 2.0
Louisville, Colorado, December 19, 2002—Attaining another industry 'first' in
its award winning cable modem program, CableLabs today announced that it has awarded
certification and qualification status for Data over Cable Service Interface Specification
(DOCSIS™) 2.0 to five companies during the recently completed round of certification
testing.
DOCSIS 2.0 modems from Motorola, Scientific-Atlanta, Terayon, Texas Instruments
and Xrosstech were certified and a cable modem termination system (CMTS) from Terayon
received DOCSIS 2.0 qualification.
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. This enables cable
networks to carry so-called peer-to-peer and business services that require high-speed
two-way capability. 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 another historic moment 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 President
and CEO Dr. Richard R. Green. "We will continue our push to add to our family of
DOCSIS specifications as new technologies warrant," Green added.
"We completed the 2.0 specifications at the beginning of this year, and now have
certified product by year end," said Rouzbeh Yassini, executive consultant to CableLabs
and head of its Broadband Access group. "That kind of efficiency for getting products
into a marketplace shows how effective the cable industry's DOCSIS process, which
brings vendors, members and CableLabs together, has become," added Yassini.
There are now more than 350 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 24, a total of 291 DOCSIS modems have received certification,
including 64 1.1 modems; 51 CMTS have gained qualified status, including 22 1.1
CMTS.
Twenty-one modems received DOCSIS 1.1 certification in Wave 24 from: Ambit, Arris,
Askey, Broadxent, Com21, Kinpo, LinkSys, Motorola, NetGear, Pioneer, Scientific-Atlanta,
Terayon, Texas Instruments, Thomson and Toshiba. Three 1.1 CMTS were qualified from:
Scientific-Atlanta, Arris and Cisco Systems.
Receiving DOCSIS 1.0 certification in Wave 24 were Efficient Networks, SMC, Thomson
and Toshiba.
As part of Certification Wave 24, CableLabs 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 will
be released Dec. 20.
CableLabs would like to extend its gratitude to the following individuals who contributed
on behalf of their respective companies to make DOCSIS 2.0 a success:
Hal Roberts and Ty Pearman of ADC; Michael Yeh of Ambit; Don Wyman of Arris Interactive;
Bruce Currivan, Scott Cummings, Lisa Denney, Margo Dolas, Roger Fish, Daniel Howard,
Tom Kolze, Niki Pantelias, Rich Prodan, Tom Willis, and Jason Willis of Broadcom;
Alon Bernstein, John T. Chapman, Dan Crocker, Rick Meller, David Liang, Bill Singer
and Jiahuai Zhou of Cisco Systems; Rich Woundy of Comcast; Mike Le of Com21; Yoav
Hebron, David Hull, Terry Jackson, Gordon Li and Shimon Tzukerman of Conexant; Rusty
Cashman and Tom Middleton of Correlant; Andy Brown and Joe Gerhardstein of Daqtron;
Hunter Donahue, Gerry Dwyer, Rob Fanfelle, Mike Grimwood, Zhenzhong Gu, Lina Nakhle
and David Raftus of Imedia; Jeff Calder, Jeff Hoffman, Elias Nemer, Adi Shaliv,
Mugundhan Varadanarayanan and Hassan Yaghoobi of Intel; Ray Harvey, Victor Hou,
Sophia Ku, David Munro and Hikmet Sari of Juniper Networks; Clive Holborow, Kevin
Marez, Jack Moran and Greg Nakanishi of Motorola; Simon Brand, Lee Colby, David
Doan, Christiaan Prins and Leo Zimmerman of Philips; George Hart of Rogers Cable;
ShinWoong Kay of Samsung; Eric Jensen and Jim Miller of Sigtek; Steve Burroughs
of Spirent; Dan Rice and Jason Schnitzer of Stargus; Aviv Goren, Asaf Matatyaou,
Adam Paramlee, Craig Patten and Tom Williams of Terayon; Curtis Barnes, Guy Cohen,
Noam Geri, Miron Tzhori, Daniel Wajcer, Ariel Yagil and Efrat Zeharhary of Texas
Instruments; Hide Haruyama of Toshiba.
CableLabs Certified® or CableLabs Qualified means that the device has passed a series
of tests for compliance with the indicated version of the Specification and has
thus demonstrated interoperable functionality with any other "CableLabs certified/qualified"
device.
Many of these devices provide other functions or are designed to comply with other
specifications, in each case tailored by the manufacturer to meet the growing needs
of consumers or cable operators in an evolving communication/entertainment sector.
While CableLabs encourages such innovation and diversity, the phrase CableLabs certified/qualified
should not be understood as an endorsement of these other attributes (or that the
product is certified to other specifications or versions), which are solely the
responsibility of the company making the additional claims.
About CableLabs: Cable Television Laboratories (www.cablelabs.com) was founded in
1988 by members of the cable television industry. A non-profit research and development
consortium, CableLabs delivers innovations that enable cable operators to be the
providers of choice in their markets. Cable operators from around the world are
members. CableLabs maintains additional web sites at www.cablenet.org, www.ebif.tv
and www.tru2way.com.
CableLabs® is a registered trademark of Cable Television Laboratories, Inc. Other
CableLabs marks are listed at http://www.cablelabs.com/certqual/trademarks. All
other marks are the property of their respective owners.