DOCSIS Certification Set for
March
Louisville, Colo. -- Despite word from Cable
Television Laboratories Inc. that
cable-modem certification won't be completed
until early March, MSOs are preparing to
deploy standardized modems on a fairly large
scale after the first of the year.
Until now, MSOs and vendors had held off from
going to commercial deployments because there
were too many uncertainties surrounding the
arcane technical details that determine whether a
modem is compliant with the standard. Those
issues are now resolved, said Rouzbeh Yassini,
executive consultant to CableLabs.
Certification that a modem is compliant with
version 1.0 of the standard -- and, therefore,
interoperable with all other compliant modems
and headend systems -- is vital to winning
retailers' support for off-the-shelf distribution.
Now, vendors said, they know enough about the
details to move forward with large-scale
production, confident that any tweaks needed to
bring deployed modems into compliance once
they are certified can be accomplished with
software upgrades in the field.
Yassini -- who, earlier this fall, had cautioned
that the "product has to do the talking" in
demonstrating DOCSIS compliance at
CableLabs -- offered assurances that it was safe
to move forward with deployments now, despite
the longer-than-anticipated timetable for
certification.
He added that he was confident that certification
of many vendors' products would be completed
by the end of the next testing cycle, which runs
from Jan. 18 to March 2.
- 12/18/98
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