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

To: Dennis R. Duke who wrote (290)	4/29/1999 3:20:00 PM
From: pat mudge	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2347

Dennis -- Here's the old post explaining DOCSIS. Notice the part about backwards compatibility: <<< A few quotes on the DOCSIS process from recently released CMTO report: "We believe there is significant investor confusion about the Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS) which was created by CableLabs, a cable industry consortium. DOCSIS 1.0 was defined with the primary goal of offering interoperable cable modems, so that once certified, consumer's can purchase a DOCSIS-certified modem and use it with any vendor's headend equipment. Although no vendor has been DOCSIS 1.0-certified, 11 vendors including Com21, 3Com, Cisco, Bay Networks (Nortel Networks), Toshiba, E-Tech, General Instruments, Samsung, Sony, Thomson, and Zenith have submitted their products to CableLabs for certification. We expect that CableLabs will announce the vendors that have passed the rigorous DOCSIS 1.0 certification program later this week [see 3/4/99 press release: Message 8148969] with DOCSIS 1.0 certified modems likely to be available in volume during the second quarter of 1999. It is not known which vendors will ultimately be certified. DOCSIS 1.1 specifications have been authored and will be finalized in the April-May time frame, and feature fragmentation, concatenation, and quality of service features to offer toll quality voice over cable. We expect DOCSIS 1.1 certified products to be available in the last quarter of 1999. Finally, DOCSIS 1.2 specifications are in the preliminary drafting phase with finalization expected toward the end of this year. The primary feature incorporated into the DOCSIS 1.2 specification is support for the S-CDMA modulation scheme which will allow cable modems to operate in the very noisy or "dirty" cable plants. We do not expect DOCSIS 1.2-certified products to be available until mid-2000. On the international front, we estimate that markets outside the United States are about one year behind in standards selections. Multivendor interoperability is the foundation of DOCSIS and consequently, DOCSIS 1.2 and 1.1 are subsets of 1.0 and require backward compatibility. All DOCSIS standards are openly published and all vendors have royalty-free access to the intellectual property needed to build a standard-compliant cable modem system. Consequently, vendors that are selected to author a particular DOCSIS standard do not have any meaningful advantage over vendors not included in the authoring process. Finally, despite DOCSIS standards, we expect many cable modem vendors to offer value-added features in their cable modem solutions in order to distinguish their products, including support for: higher speeds, superior noise reduction techniques, and virtual private networking features. >>>>>