Although I am leaving money on the table, I do not recommend, sell or promote specific equipment or vendors. There is good equipment out there and bad equipment. My company, The Volpe Firm, is frequently approached to either sell or recommend products to my clients for commission, but often I find myself troubleshooting with different vendor equipment and vendor devices, so it is important that I remain a neutral party. In addition I don’t want a bad recommendation to poorly reflect on my reputation.

My recommendation is that you first get datasheets from available equipment vendors you may be interested in. Next, contact the sales reps/engineers and have them come in and demo the equipment so that you are familiar with how to use the equipment. Ask for a demo unit for one week so that you can test it onsite and record its accuracy / precision against a reference you have available. Do the same with the next vendor and the one after that. By the time you have gone through this experiment with each vendor you should have a pretty good idea of the vendor’s support, the equipment ease of use, its features, and side-by-side accuracy / precision with other equivalent equipment provided you are keeping good notes when you make your measurements. You don’t always get what you pay for and there is a difference from vendor to vendor.

I hope this helps.

Regards,
-Brady

Until just recently I would have said “Yes”, more bonded downstreams mean a more robust downstream. But not so fast. Unlike partial service in the upstream (read my article on Partial Service), the CMTS has no way of knowing that downstream channel is down or impaired going to a subscriber’s cable modem. So the CMTS will continue to “stripe” data across all bonded channels. So if you have four downstream bonded channels and one channel is down or impaired, then 25% of the data will be lost.

This was discussed during a recent SCTE Seminar I was giving in North Carolina where an operator experienced this very problem. I am in the process of configuring a DOCSIS 3.0 CMTS in my lab where I can run some experiments to definitively prove the issue and provide a full article back to this site.

-Brady

-Brady

This article has helped me secure my network in many ways.

I am an engineer in charge of a small cable company in Patagonia Argentina. We started to offer internet service around 8 months ago – before that it was just cable – .

During the first two months we didn’t have any kind of security but a shared secret, and we experienced some theft of service by a couple of -well identified- users.

Now we have mandatory BPI+ and tftp enforce, which has made theft of service disappear.

Thanks for showing me where to look!