Three More DOCSIS 2.0 Modems Certified

Louisville, Colorado, June 25, 2004—CableLabs® announced today that it has awarded qualified status to a DOCSIS® 2.0 cable modem termination system (CMTS) from Arris.

CableLabs also announced three more DOCSIS 2.0 cable modems had achieved certified status, that it had recertified five other DOCSIS 2.0 modems, and that it had qualified two DOCSIS 1.1 CMTSs.

Ambit, Cisco-Linksys, LLC; and Thomson were certified for DOCSIS 2.0 modems. Conexant (2), Motorola, and Scientific-Atlanta (2) received re-certifications. ADC and Motorola were qualified for DOCSIS 1.1 CMTSs.

This marks the first time that all submitted DOCSIS devices have passed certification or qualification testing in a single certification wave.

There are hundreds of DOCSIS cable modems and 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™ project, and packet telephony and multimedia services through CableLabs� PacketCable™ project.

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 and www.ebif.tv.

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.