CableLabs Certifies DOCSIS-Based Plant Monitoring Device in Addition to Eight DOCSIS 2.0 Modems.

Business Editors

LOUISVILLE, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 16, 2004

CableLabs(R) announced Friday that it had awarded certified status to 8 more DOCSIS(R) 2.0 modems and re-certified two additional DOCSIS 2.0 modems in its Certification Wave 28 that concluded recently.

The following companies: Ambit, Askey, Castlenet, Shenzhen Coship, Motorola (3 modems), and Thomson, achieved certified status for DOCSIS 2.0. Castlenet and Motorola were recertified for DOCSIS 2.0 products. The specific product models of the certified and recertified devices are available on the CableLabs web site (www.cablelabs.com/certqual/).

In addition, CableLabs announced the following companies were certified for DOCSIS 1.1: Electroline and Toshiba (2 modems). Thomson received DOCSIS 1.0 certification for a modem as well.

The Electroline submission uses DOCSIS protocols as the platform to monitor the on-line status of active network components, such as amplifiers. "DOCSIS implementations continue to grow and expand into new areas of support for the cable operator's systems, said Jay Rolls, DOCSIS Certification Board Chair and Vice President Telephone & Data Engineering for Cox Communications, Inc. "This represents another chapter in the success of the DOCSIS platform, as cable operators begin to use the same DOCSIS infrastructure for network reliability as for high-speed data service delivery."

There are hundreds of DOCSIS cable modems and cable modem termination systems (CMTSs) that have been certified or qualified respectively.

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. DOCSIS 2.0 provides not only significantly higher channel capacity, but also better robustness against the impairments found in noisy cable plants. Better robustness has been achieved by adding features such as stronger Forward Error Correction (FEC), byte interleaving to break up noise bursts, and a more powerful equalizer. In addition, many CMTS vendors have implemented advanced ingress/impairment cancellation algorithms. The typical impairments that DOCSIS 2.0 is able to mitigate include additive white Gaussian noise, impulse/burst noise, narrowband ingress, common path distortion, micro-reflections, and hum modulation.

DOCSIS 1.1 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 an expanding list of advanced IP-based cable services offered by cable providers, including home networking through CableLabs' CableHome(TM) project, and packet telephony and multimedia services through CableLabs' PacketCable(TM) project.

CableLabs(R) Certified(TM) 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.

Founded in 1988 by members of the cable television industry, Cable Television Laboratories is a non-profit research and development consortium that is dedicated to pursuing new cable telecommunications technologies and to helping its cable operator members integrate those advancements into their business objectives. Cable operators from around the world are members. CableLabs maintains web sites at www.cablelabs.com; www.packetcable.com; www.cablemodem.com; www.cablenet.org; and www.opencable.com.

CableLabs, DOCSIS, CableHome, PacketCable, OpenCable, OCAP, CableCARD(TM), and CableNET are trademarks of Cable Television Laboratories, Inc. Go2Broadband(SM) is a service mark of CableLabs.