When I hear people talking about DOCSIS 3.1 and its great performance, the critic in me wonders: is the technology as good as promised, or is it all just savvy marketing? In this blog post, we’ll be taking a look at the promises and the challenges of DOCSIS 3.1. Download speeds of...

Nothing is perfect. We all know this, and we have to live with it. However, trying to improve is a key to success. This is true for cable networks as well. A bad plant condition and interferers may degrade the communication between CM and CMTS. Luckily though there is lot...

While working with DOCSIS systems it is important to understand the upstream periodic ranging process. Ranging can be seen as the DOCSIS heartbeat between Cable Modem (CM) and Cable Modem Termination System (CMTS). As many people tend to struggle with the details of this process, the goal of this article is to visualize the periodic ranging process. Lets...

If you ask cable people for the differences between DOCSIS and EuroDOCSIS, the only thing they can typically think of is the difference in downstream channel width: 6 MHz for DOCSIS, 8 MHz for EuroDOCSIS. In reality there’s a lot more to it, as we will discuss in this blog...

The CM-STATUS feature is of significant value in DOCSIS 3.x networks. However, originally it was designed in a way it was not 100% reliable. A specification addition in March 2014 changed this messaging facility and it was further fine-tuned in August 2014. This blog post provides an overview on why...

Like the mobile 4G standard LTE or the terrestrial digital video broadcasting standard DVB-T, the new cable modem standard DOCSIS 3.1 now uses Orthogonal Frequency Division techniques for signal transport. The channel consists of orthogonal subcarriers that will carry the information over the link. More on orthogonal subcarriers in our course...