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Technology Stocks : COM21 (CMTO) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: pat mudge who wrote (590)	6/18/1999 3:30:00 PM
From: Mark Laubach	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 2347

Pat, There's a few points and observations that I forgot to make in my last response about DOCSIS standards. The certification process is an interesting one. If you look at what CableLabs has done for DOCSIS 1.0, they require that a vendor's cable modem be tested against CMTS's from at least three different vendors. For critical mass, it has meant that there must be multiple CMTS's and multiple cable modem vendors in the certification process. Cable modems get certified. CMTS's get approved. If a given cable modem model is changed in any way, or a vendor comes out with a new model, they must be separately certified. Observation: the certification process for 1.0 is not easy, otherwise every vendor would be certified by now. Observation: many cable operators are not waiting for modems to be certified prior to deployment. They are expecting the vendor to do a software upgrade or whatever to bring modems up to compliance. It seems likely that CableLabs would want to stick to the same multiple vendor interoperability requirements for both DOCSIS 1.1 and DOCSIS 1.2 certification. Which means for a certification wave to begin, there must be a critical mass of vendors in the wave, both with cable modems and CMTS's. You can tell from reading the DOCSIS 1.1 specs that there are many more options and facilities to test. Essentially, there are many more "knobs" added to the protocol. Testing all the knobs will be tedious and therefore time consuming. DOCSIS 1.2 adds numerous amounts of PHY extensions and PHY knobs to DOCSIS 1.1 and therefore more test cases. If the certification waves for DOCSIS 1.1 and DOCSIS 1.2 proceed at all like DOCSIS 1.0, it'll be interesting to see just when each vendor emerges from the "certification chute" regardless of how competent that vendor appears going into the chute. Observation: a vendor cannot claim they are DOCSIS 1.x compliant until after they have obtained certification. Mark