Cable raises data delivery ante with DOCSIS 1.1 product approvals

Cable has moved to its next stage of high-speed data delivery with CableLabs’ certification of DOCSIS 1.1 cable modems from Texas Instruments and Toshiba. The industry also qualified DOCSIS 1.1 cable-modem termination system (CMTS) products from Arris and Cadant.

DOCSIS 1.1 moves cable from best-effort data delivery to providing business-class quality-of-service parameters that let cable operators tier services. DOCSIS 1.1 is also the foundation of the industry’s PacketCable voice-over-IP (VoIP) effort and a key component to the industry’s CableHome home-networking project.

But initial plus of DOCSIS 1.1 is the benefit that comes from having quality of service from the headend to the home.

“Tiered data definitely resonates with the MSO customer base,” said Cadant’s Marketing Director Tim Doiron.

Cable is accustomed to tiering its video packages so DOCSIS 1.1 takes that same concept and applies it to the data space, he said.

“You can live with a stratified structure that provides guaranteed bandwidth delivery,” he said.

DOCSIS 1.1 products interoperate with already approved DOCSIS 1.0 units and will work with future DOCSIS 2.0 technologies. Cadant was somewhat unique in that it did not seek DOCSIS 1.0 qualification but aimed directly at 1.1 status from its inception. Arris, on the other hand, was one of the earliest DOCSIS 1.0-qualified CMTS.

“DOCSIS 1.0 provided good things like interoperability, but it’s really the DOCSIS 1.1 feature set that takes this to the next level and provides the foundation for the advanced services like IP telephony,” Doiron said.

To date, 178 DOCSIS 1.0 modems have received certification and 24 CMTS have been qualified. Significantly, new silicon from Correlant and Terayon were included in certified modems. Terayon, whose advanced synchronous code division multiple access (S-CDMA) advanced physical layer is a key part of DOCSIS 2.0 specifications, has said it would spin off its silicon unit and that much would depend on whether it received DOCSIS certification.