Wired

One of the key roles that CableLabs plays for our member operators and the vendor community is tracking trends in key areas of the broadband industry. Because the networks operated by our members are predominantly fiber, we are always keeping a close eye on the optical industry — but this year is proving to be […]

In the world of passive optical networks (PON), achieving seamless interoperability has been a long-standing challenge, leaving operators trying to fit square pegs into round holes. This legacy is largely due to the intentional flexibility in PON standards, designed to foster innovation by avoiding overly prescriptive implementations. However, this flexibility often leaves too much room […]

Anyone remember the jingle for Jolt® Cola? All the sugar and twice the caffeine! Perhaps the phrase dates me, but I still hear it in my head—although I now have new words to set to it: All the distance and twice the capacity! OK, maybe it doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. But […]

We are pleased to announce today’s issuance of new versions of the Flexible MAC Architecture (FMA) System and MAC Manager Interface (MMI) specifications. This release denotes the completion of phase one for the FMA specifications and opens the doors for beginning FMA interoperability events. Speaking of such events, we are also pleased to inform you […]

This past June, CableLabs publicly released the first issued version of the Coherent Termination Device (CTD) Requirements Specification. The same month, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Standards Association (SA) approved amendment 802.3ct-2021, which defines 100G Ethernet using coherent optics. Combined with previous point-to-point (P2P) coherent optics specifications released by CableLabs, these two […]

The cable industry has been well served by its extensive fiber deployment that took place during the initial hybrid fiber-coax (HFC) buildout. Even though cable operators have answered capacity demand through fiber node-splits in specific high demand scenarios, only recently have operators embarked on deeper-fiber roll-out strategies as part of a comprehensive long-term evolution plan. […]

Cable network reliability has many important dimensions, but operators are all too familiar with the significant cost of maintenance and repair, and some with the advantages of Proactive Network Maintenance (PNM). But not everyone has taken full advantage of PNM. Let’s have a look at some of the reasons for that, and what CableLabs is […]

0.0000026 seconds. For the more technically inclined, that’s 2.6 microseconds. Which is how long it would take light to travel a third of a mile through fiber optic cable. It was also the length of the show floor at OFC: The Optical Networking and Communications Conference and Exhibition, held in March in San Diego, California. […]

Sometimes, two apps are better than one. We now have two versions of the Cable Modem Validation Application (CMVA) available for download and use: a new lab automation version, and a data exploration version. Thing One and Thing Two Lab automation and certification have unique requirements, but investigation and invention require flexibility. Because the CMVA […]

Forward error correction (FEC) has been a powerful tool in the cable industry for many years. In fact, perhaps the single biggest performance improvement in the DOCSIS 3.1 specifications was achieved by changing the FEC being used in previous versions – Reed-Soloman (RS) – to a new coding scheme with improved performance: low-density parity check […]