Texas Instruments said several cable modem and cable-modem termination system vendors that are using its Puma 5 family of Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification 3.0 chip sets have submitted products for CableLabs’ DOCSIS 3.0 testing in Certification Wave 56 starting this week.
The company declined to identify which of its customers for the Puma 5 silicon are participating in the certification wave.
TI’s customers for DOCSIS chips include Motorola and Arris Group. Meanwhile, Cisco Systems and TI have already tested interoperability of their DOCSIS 3.0 equipment bonding two upstream channels, which marked the first time such upstream-bonding features have been verified as interoperable, according to the companies.
Among other features, DOCSIS 3.0 offers the ability to virtually bond together multiple quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) downstream channels to act as if they were a single connection, boosting bandwidth to 160 Mbps or higher.
Comcast CEO Brian Roberts last month said the operator expects to begin offering services based on DOCSIS 3.0 (a.k.a. “wideband”) technology next year.
