LOUISVILLE, COLO. -Cable Television Laboratories Inc. said a host of tech companies have joined a royalty-free pool for intellectual property rights pertaining to its proposed "CableHome" home-networking interface specification, and released the interim specs for the PacketCable platform.
CableLabs said the following companies signed on for the CableHome royalty-free effort: 3Com Corp., Adaptive Networks, Arris Interactive LLC, Atheros Communications, Broadband Home, Broadcom Corp., Cisco Systems Inc., Conexant Systems, DoBox, HighSpeed Surfint, Intel Corp., Intersil, Magis Networks, Navic Systems, Philips Digital Video, Proxim, ShareWave and Terayon Communications Systems Inc.
CableLabs said those vendors will help the organization and its member companies draft an interoperability home-networking specification for the cable industry.
Introduced earlier this year, the CableHome project is designed to extend cable-based services using wired and wireless home networking.
Today, several of those protocols are generating a groundswell of support, including Home Phoneline Networking Alliance (HomePNA), HomeRF, Bluetooth, 802.11b and HAVi (Home Audio-Video Interoperability), a platform that links and controls televisions, DVD players, VCRs, stereos and PCs from one remote control.
In other news, CableLabs said it has completed the second phase of the PacketCable project, releasing new interim specifications and technical reports for the standard.
The latest release describes specification extensions such as call signaling, quality of service and event messaging, CableLabs said.
PacketCable, when combined with DOCSIS 1.1-based cable-networking equipment, will provide the multimedia architecture cable operators need to offer advanced applications such as Internet-protocol telephony, virtual private networks and interactive gaming.
