From June 20th to 24th, 2016, Excentis hosted a successful DOCSIS 3.1 interoperability testing event.

This event allowed all actors —18 companies!— to test their DOCSIS 3.1 gear in the vendor-independent lab environment of Excentis. All testing was coordinated and supported by Excentis’ DOCSIS 3.1 experts.

On the Cable Modem side, participating vendors were Arris, Askey, Broadcom (reference design), Compal, Hitron, Humax, Intel (reference design), Kaonmedia, Sagemcom, Technicolor and Ubee. Their equipment was tested against CMTS products from Arris, Casa, Cisco and Huawei. Test & measurement equipment from Epidox Solutions, Keysight, Rohde & Schwarz and Excentis supported the event. Excentis’ own ByteBlower was used for all DOCSIS 3.1 traffic testing.

Tested DOCSIS 3.1 features include maximal bonding (as supported by the equipment) of OFDM/OFDMA/SC-QAM channels, multiple mixed profiles with zero bit loading and exclusion band, dynamic profile fallback triggered by adding LTE800 interference, PNM, 2000 Byte packets… and more. A number of observed issues were taken back by the vendor engineers for fixing.

On Thursday June 23rd Excentis organised a DOCSIS 3.1 operator workshop. More than 50 representatives of European cable operators had fruitful discussions on their approaches and challenges with DOCSIS 3.1. After the workshop, vendors participating in the interop got the chance to present and demonstrate their products to the operator group.