Preparing the way for the cable industry's next-generation broadband technical standard, DOCSIS 3.0, CableLabs has approved the first piece of equipment meeting a small but key requirement of that standard.

In its busiest product testing round of the year, CableLabs gave its blessing last week to a device that would be an element of the new modular cable modem termination system (M-CMTS) established by the DOCSIS 3.0 (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification) standard released earlier this month. Specifically, the R&D consortium qualified a DOCSIS Timing Interface Server (DTIS), which is designed to provide an accurate clock and DOCSIS time-stamp to both the M-CMTS core and the edge QAM in the new DOCSIS 3.0 architecture, synchronizing the upstream and downstream data flows.

At the same time, CableLabs okayed one of the industry's first embedded cable modem module (eCCM) devices. The module is a small cable modem designed to be placed in another consumer electronics device, thereby imbuing it with high-speed Internet access.

Winning the nod for the industry's first approved DTIS, Symmetricom Inc. (Nasdaq: SYMM) passed muster with its Time Creator 1000, a network time synchronization system that it designed for cable networks. The pizza-box-sized DTIS is the first cable product for the San Jose-based tech firm, which specializes in time and frequency products and services and has been working closely with BigBand Networks Inc. (Nasdaq: BBND) on M-CMTS equipment.

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— Alan Breznick, Site Editor, Cable Digital News