DOCSIS - Regional Variants

Regional Variants

As frequency allocation bandwidth plans differ between United States and European CATV systems, DOCSIS standards have been modified for use in Europe. These modifications were published under the name "EuroDOCSIS". The differences between the bandwidths exist because European cable TV conforms to PAL standards of 8 MHz bandwidth and North American cable TV conforms to ATSC standards which specify 6 MHz. The wider bandwidth in EuroDOCSIS architectures permits more bandwidth to be allocated to the downstream data path (toward the user). EuroDOCSIS certification testing is executed by Belgian company Excentis (formerly known as tComLabs), while DOCSIS certification testing is executed by CableLabs. Typically, customer premises equipment receives "certification", while CMTS equipment receives "qualification".

Most cable systems in Japan and Colombia utilize the North American version of DOCSIS, while some employ a variant of DOCSIS that uses upstream channels that are based on a 9.216 MHz master clock (as opposed to 10.24 MHz used in DOCSIS/EuroDOCSIS) resulting in upstream channel widths that are a power-of-two division of 6 MHz (as opposed to 6.4 MHz in DOCSIS/EuroDOCSIS).