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LANcity, Broadcom, 3Com and GI/Motorola – companies that established the foundation of what would become DOCSIS – were awarded Emmys this week. Broadband is now the foundation cable, but skepticism reigned in the early days.
Four companies that helped establish the technical foundation of what would lead to DOCSIS and the cable industry's interoperable broadband platform got some overdue recognition this week with Tech Emmys.
Specifically, those companies – LANcity, Broadcom, 3Com and General Instrument/Motorola – were awarded the Technology and Engineering Emmy for "pioneering technologies enabling high performance communications over cable TV systems."
According to Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard, the former CEO and founder of LANcity, each company contributed core elements of what would eventually become the baseline of what would become DOCSIS 1.0. LANcity, he explained, brought forth the media access control (MAC) layer, while GI/Motorola added modulation technology, Broadcom developed the silicon and 3Com provided the initial provisioning systems.
Most of those companies have changed hands multiple times since those early days. LANcity was originally acquired by Bay Networks in 1996 for $56 million, and 3Com, which also made and sold cable modems of its own during the early days of DOCSIS, was acquired by HP in 2010. The portion of GI and Motorola tied to DOCSIS products was later sold to Google, then acquired by Arris and is now part of CommScope (the network-facing tech) and Vantiva (customer premises equipment). Broadcom remains and is now starting work on what might become DOCSIS 5.0.
Yassini said the mixture of technologies from those pioneering days of cable broadband were already starting to work at scale as a proprietary platform even as DOCSIS was being developed. LANcity and its partners, he added, also adopted open standards such as Ethernet, 6MHz channels and SNMP. That approach helped it beat other alternatives that were considered at the time, such as ATM and FDDI (fiber distributed data interface).
"The reason why DOCSIS 1.0 worked so elegantly and in such a short time frame was because it was based on proven, working technology," said Yassini, who has been referred to as the "Father of the Cable Modem" over the years – a label he's never really embraced. "Without that, DOCSIS would've taken a lot longer."
Emmy recognition took time
Emmy recognition for the group was years in the making. Though CableLabs was awarded a Tech Emmy in 2010 for its development work on DOCSIS, the companies that developed the core technologies that would help to form the DOCSIS specs were not tied into that specific honor.
"We had to make the case to the [Emmy] committee that before DOCSIS was created there was a group of pioneers from 1987 to 1996 that were developing technology that became the core DNA of DOCSIS," Yassini told Light Reading Wednesday at the award ceremony in New York.
Nearly a dozen members of the original LANcity team joined Yassini in New York to receive the honor Wednesday at the 75th annual Technology and Engineering Emmy Awards, including Pamela Yassini-Fard, Dale Hokanson, Chris Grobicki, Paul Nikolich, John Ulm, Les Borden, Dick McGarry, Tony Disessa, Dale Meyers and Nick Signore.
Several members of the original LANcity team joined company founder and CEO Rouzbeh Yassini on stage to accept the Emmy honor in New York on October 9, 2024. (Source: Jeff Baumgartner/Light Reading)
"This is really the first time since LANcity ... sold the company that this group of people got together. So, that, by itself, is historical," Yassini said.
During the event, LANcity also presented a brief video with a list of more than 100 other individuals who participated in the development of cable broadband technology from 1987 to 1996.
"Today is a good recognition of the team," said Yassini, who was inducted into the Cable Hall of Fame earlier this year for his contributions to the industry.
Big bets and skepticism marked the early days of cable broadband
DOCSIS and broadband would eventually supplant pay-TV as the cornerstone of the cable business. But the decades-long success of DOCSIS was not necessarily clear at the time.
"I don't think anyone envisioned that many years back what would happen to this industry and the incredible growth that would happen," Ed Breen, the former CEO of GI and current member of the Comcast board, told Light Reading.
At the time, GI was also developing technology and products that would help to underpin cable's pivot to digital video and a massive expansion of programming channels. Together with its work around delivering broadband over hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) networks, they represented the "biggest technology bets we ever made" at GI, Breen recalls.
"We had high confidence, but it was a big, big bet for GI," he said. "It was a big gamble, but, boy, did it pay off for us and it paid off for all of the other cable operators out there."
Thanks in part to the rise of DOCSIS and the cable modem, broadband "certainly is the backbone of all the streaming services," Breen said. "It was amazing what happened. The credit goes to the scientists and engineers in the company."
Others involved in the early days were more skeptical that the cable-delivered broadband would be a slam dunk.
"Initially, I thought it was going to be a complete and total dud," Paul Nikolich, an engineering exec who joined LANcity via its acquisition of a company called Applitek, told Light Reading. At the time, he believed the technology was too expensive and wasn't scalable. (Editor's note: LANcity's original cable modem weighed 120 pounds and cost about $18,000 to make, Yassini told Light Reading in April.)
Nikolich also questioned if cable operators would make the necessary upgrades to support high-speed Internet.
Nikolich, who left LANcity for a time but was convinced to return to help with the design of the baseband and RF portions of this new class of cable modems, said he was pleasantly proven incorrect.
"I was wrong, because the cable infrastructure was upgraded and Rouzbeh worked really hard putting together a technology that would work reliably over the emerging new hybrid fiber/coax technology. And it ended up a tremendous success," said Nikolich, an IEEE Fellow who served as the chairman of the IEEE 802 LAN/MAN standards committee for more than two decades (he currently serves as Past Chairman Emeritus for that committee).
Nikolich was also part of an M&A wave that splashed over the supplier arena in the early days of DOCSIS. He was with Broadband Access Systems (BAS), an early maker of carrier-class cable modem terminations systems (CMTSs), when the company was sold to ADC for $2.25 billion in stock in the fall of 2000. That deal set the bar for other M&A activity involving an early group of DOCSIS vendors.
Another LANcity exec and cable industry pioneer who also saw many cable tech companies change hands over the years was John Ulm.
Ulm, one of LANcity's first hires following its Applitek acquisition, was brought on board to work on the MAC protocol, and later brought his expertise to Motorola, Google, Arris and CommScope. Ulm, now a member of the Cable TV Pioneers, also was "skeptical back in the early days." But he always believed in Yassini's vision for broadband.
"The LANcity team was very small and very tight," Ulm recalled. "For me, this recognition is for the entire team. But it was a vision that Rouzbeh had back in the early days of changing the way the world would work."
Long live DOCSIS
Ulm is likewise heartened by the longevity of DOCSIS as it embarks on a new generation that is targeting speeds of 25 Gbit/s on HFC. Like Ethernet, DOCSIS has continuously evolved and remained relevant over the decades, Ulm said.
Yassini also believes DOCSIS still has much life left, even as cable operators push fiber deeper into their HFC networks and primarily use fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) technology for new builds.
"If there's any coax left on the last mile or the last hundred feet ... the elements of DOCSIS will supply that flexibility. At some point, there will be no coax left, and that will be the end of DOCSIS," Yassini said. "I think I will be happy to tell you that I'm the guy who started it and I'm the guy who will actually see the end of it."
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