CableLabs has quietly ceded its testing and certification activities to its for-profit arm, Kyrio. The industry consortium has also made changes intended to accelerate certification of DOCSIS 3.1 products.
CableLabs made this announcement on its website with little fanfare back in March, and it wasn’t unearthed until Multichannel News reported on it yesterday.
“Kyrio is responsible for the executing the testing for CableLabs certification programs. Additionally, Kyrio handles the customer relationships and operations, including receiving devices, accepting payments, executing tests, and developing test program reports,” Kyrio said in a Q&A clarifying the change, posted on its website Wednesday. “These results are presented to the appropriate CableLabs Certification Board to determine whether or not a device should be certified, as has always been the case in the past.”
Kyrio said the testing requirements will remain the same. “The testing will be completed using the same team with the same attention to detail as before, and the same certification board will still determine certification.
RELATED: CableLabs’ Kyrio promises Wi-Fi roaming among 8-9 cable operators by 2017
Kyrio did, however, outline changes to its testing and certification program for DOCSIS 3.1 technologies.
The consortium is reorganizing the sequence of its tests and implementing a "two-phased test strategy consisting of core and secondary testing." This approach, Kyrio said, will begin July 14 and is intended to "find critical issues sooner in the certification wave and to make the process more consistent."
With core testing being the area in which the consortium typically discovers things that prevent a device from being certified, these tests will now take place in the first phase of the process.