The DOCSIS™ Success Story

On DOCSIS’ third anniversary, the industry celebrates a crucial milestone and a brighter future

By Michael Lafferty

When the concept of creating an industry-wide specification for high-speed data first surfaced in the mid-1990s, the cable industry embraced the concept quite firmly. The Internet and its potential beckoned to the industry. Data distribution had been a telecommunications service and cable’s entrepreneurs saw the need to grasp firmly on interoperability and specifications as the way to get into this new high-speed data business.

They saw that times and service offerings were indeed about to change. To stay ahead of the newly competitive pack created by the 1996 Telecommunications Act, operators realized cooperation, not conflict (good-natured or otherwise), was the key to their continued success.

“The DOCSIS™ effort,” says Dr. Richard Green, president of CableLabs™, “was the first time that the cable industry had really looked at a central effort in trying to address that problem (of actually developing a spec). It had some very unique features. “One was that these modems were going to be the first retail product the industry ever had. For that reason, we had to address issues of interoperability and portability in a way consumers could understand—which the industry had never done. We had no idea of what kind of structures to set up or how to go about it. So, it was a whole new adventure for the cable industry.”

This new adventure for the industry involved lots of challenges piled on top of the fact that it had never been done before, says Rouzbeh Yassini, executive consultant to CableLabs and founder and CEO of YAS Broadband Ventures, LLC. Yassini has led the cable modem initiative for the past three years. “Another thing,” says Yassini, “was [that] people didn’t think we could get cooperation from the vendor community to achieve our goals in a timely manner. The third thing, which was more important, was that it was just such a complex animal. It was like trying to eat an elephant. You just can’t eat it all at once because there’s just too much to handle. Instead, you have to eat it one bite at a time.”

Whether shepherding this ‘bite-by-bite’ process was kismet, a grand design or just great partnership between vendors and members, says Yassini, CableLabs was where it needed to be when the DOCSIS effort got underway. “You need to have an independent organization like CableLabs with its open process to bring all these people together and I think they did a great job. They were at the right place and the right time with the three key milestones of specifications, interoperability and certification that led to working technology in a very fast process.”

Not only were they where they needed to be, says Yassini, they also helped to forge a specification and certification process that’s become the envy of allies and competitors alike. The amazingly short 33 months it took to go from spec to retail product, he says, “is an achievement that no other industry standard has ever been able to pull together in the 20th Century. When you talk to many people out there, they look to this program as a model. In fact, when you talk to the DSL or wireless guys, they’ve taken a snapshot of our process and tried to copy it. That’s the beauty of this whole thing. It wasn’t really, from my point of view, a slam-dunk, a let’s-just-get-something-done-quick sort of thing. We wanted to do something right and do it the right way.”

A good part of doing it the “right way,” says David Fellows, CTO at AT&T Broadband, was the fact that they looked to the Internet itself for direction in creating the specification. “We adopted a few rules of the Internet,” explains Fellows. “One of the most important is that you have to show that something works. There may be a great paper analysis, but you have to show that it actually works. So, that means best-of-breed is the best of the actual working product, not the best computer analysis. “In DOCSIS 2.0 we still stick to that. If Terayon had not actually developed SCDMA in a proprietary manner, we wouldn’t have taken their paper input that said they thought they could make it work. They actually had to bring it in and show it to us working. It was the same way for all of these things.”

This cooperative effort to develop DOCSIS by operators, vendors and CableLabs engineers, while unique in the beginning, has become a way of life for the industry’s dedicated professionals, says Mark Coblitz, senior vice president for strategic planning at Comcast Corporation. In fact, he and many others believe that it has altered the industry’s approach to technical challenges in a very fundamental way, a way that will have a serious impact on the future of broadband. “Our DOCSIS experience,” says Coblitz, “is why we can do PacketCable, which is why we can do OpenCable, which is why we think we can do CableHome, and maybe other things to follow.

“The basic template of vendors working together and contributing intellectual property so that we could come up with specifications and then take those specs to standards bodies, is a path that allows the cable industry, when appropriate, to react to the outside world as one technical solution. That’s something DOCSIS really showed we could do. It made it more cost effective, more beneficial to consumers, and more beneficial to operators. In that regard I think it’s success has been crucial to follow-on efforts.”

And just how successful has DOCSIS been?

Yassini is proud to point out that to date, more than 15 million cable modem units have been shipped and “we have added $4.5 billion revenue to the bottom line of the cable industry” with high-speed data services. Chris Bowick, senior vice president of engineering and CTO at Cox Communications says the success of DOCSIS has a great deal to do with increasing the industry’s competitiveness.

“I’ve got to tell you,” says Bowick, “it’s amazing what standardization will do for you from a competitive perspective. It’s done several things. It’s driven down the price of modems from something like $450 or $500 four years ago, down to below $100 boxes. Heck, and we’re seeing even better pricing.”

“Not only that, something we couldn’t have done without standardization, is that we now have about 500 retail outlets we’ve partnered with selling modems in our markets. In addition, 23 percent of the new modems being purchased are being purchased at these retail outlets.”

Bowick points out that more than 57 percent of Cox’s high-speed data customers now own their own modems. And those numbers are growing, he says, with 68 percent of all new high-speed Internet customers purchasing their own modems. For operators, says Bowick, getting that capital off the company books may be the ultimate accolade for DOCSIS.

“We can do just some back-of-the-envelope math,” explains Bowick. “We’ve got over 1 million subs. Of that, 57 percent of them have purchased their own modems. That would represent, let’s say, 570,000 units at an average cost per unit of $100. So, that means maybe $57 million has been kept off our books.”

Hmmm, that’s not bad at all for a bouncing three-year-old spec to have to say for itself. The open process, the great partnership between vendors and members has created some of the key industry cornerstones known as broadband that is now working for consumers worldwide.

Michael Lafferty is a freelance writer and former senior editor for CED (Communications Engineering & Design) Magazine.