Cable industry research and development lab CableLabs has issued the first DOCSIS 3.1 certifications to five cable modem vendors.
Among those to obtain the product certifications were Askey, Castlenet, Netgear, Technicolor and Ubee Interactive.
According to the CableLabs release, certification means that the vendors’ DOCSIS 3.1 products comply with the required specifications, interoperability among products and enable competition and choice in the marketplace.
The certification of five vendors marks the largest first certification wave for any DOCSIS specification, CableLabs said.
“(This) news marks a key milestone for CableLabs in technical leadership and time to market,” said CableLabs President and CEO Phil McKinney. “The DOCSIS 3.1 specifications assure the cable industry’s leadership in the delivery of broadband services. This represents the most rapid development and implementation cycle for a broadband technology development program ever delivered by CableLabs. Development of the initial DOCSIS 3.1 specifications to product certification has occurred in half the time of previous DOCSIS specifications.”
DOCSIS 3.1 is the most recent update to the Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification. First introduced in 1997, the latest DOCSIS iteration was announced in October 2012 at the Cable-Tec Expo. Over the past 14 months, CableLabs said it has held 14 DOCSIS 3.1 interoperability and dry run testing events.
According to CableLabs, DOCSIS 3.1 is “designed to meet the demand for higher speeds cost effectively by improving network efficiency and scalability while operating on existing cable operator networks, maintaining backward compatibility with existing DOCSIS deployments.” The specifications will also help reduce latency, thereby improving responsiveness in applications like gaming.
The new technology can be deployed over operators’ existing Hybrid Fiber Coax networks, CableLabs said.
Comcast, which has been chomping at the bit to deploy the new technology, has said it will push deployments throughout 2016 and plans to cover its entire network footprint with DOCSIS 3.1 by 2018.
“The delivery of certified DOCSIS 3.1 devices is critical to Comcast and the cable industry,” Comcast Cable Communications president and CEO Neil Smit said in a statement. “This year, Comcast will begin offering our customers new gigabit speed services enabled with DOCSIS 3.1 technology. Congratulations to CableLabs for taking DOCSIS 3.1 from laboratory to living room in record time.”