Ten Companies Seeking DOCSIS Certification

hree additional vendors, Com21, Sony, and E-Tech, Inc., have entered the data over cable service interface specification (DOCSIS) dry run and certification process.

There are now a total of ten companies seeking DOCSIS compliance and certification of their cable modems. The existing vendors are 3Com, Cisco, General Instrument, Nortel Networks, Samsung, Thomson Consumer Electronics, and Toshiba.

DOCSIS remains on track for the possible delivery of interoperable high-speed cable data modems to retail stores this year. DOCSIS' goal is to inform the cable industry and its suppliers on what vendors' cable modems will be certified as interoperable. Certification warrants the modems' full compliance with the DOCSIS 1.0 specification and, therefore, sufficient retail-market quality.

The cable industry is committed to maintaining the integrity of the DOCSIS process in order to ensure that the process results in retail-quality cable modems.

The DOCSIS certification process is managed by a committee of cable operators to which certification results are made available by CableLabs®.

CableLabs does not make certification decisions. Cable operators make their own independent decisions about which modems to purchase and which modem deployments to continue. At this point, there are about a dozen field trials of DOCSIS modems underway by a handful of cable companies.

Each vendor applying for certification receives a written report from the certification board highlighting areas of non-compliance with the DOCSIS specification.

The report is composed of two parts-documentation feedback based on conformance to the specification, as detailed in tests (PICS, acceptance test plan, interoperability, and executive summary) performed by vendors at their own facilities, and results of qualitative, quantitative, and stability testing in CableLabs' alpha, beta, and field labs.

In this certification process, the vendor's product does the talking, according to Rouzbeh Yassini, executive consultant and DOCSIS team leader. Product that is certified to meet all DOCSIS 1.0 requirements will receive a retail certification sticker.