CableLabs Royalty-Free Standards Play

“CableLabs drove innovation through a unique collaborative model: a royalty-free licensing system that avoided patent lawsuits and complex payment schemes—the downfall of many tech agreements. This approach helped DOCSIS cable modems spread globally at remarkable speed. CableLabs could sublicense the technology to vendors on the same royalty-free basis, opening the door for smaller players to enter the market and increasing consumer choice. It also reduced reliance on dominant suppliers like GI, which charged for licensing its digital video-compression tech. With no threat of patent litigation, engineers could build on competitors’ designs, cut R&D costs, and speed up improvements.”

“And there were no standards. Most consumer electronics work no matter where you buy them, but if you bought a cable modem in New York, there was no guarantee it would work in New Jersey, because each cable operator’s architecture was different, and each cable modem sent different amounts of data upstream and downstream. Just as MPEG-2 was the language for digital compression of video, this new platform begged for a similar standard that every supplier could build on. At the CableLabs board meeting on November 30, 1995, although the agenda was packed, I had only one thing on my mind: high-speed cable modems. Urgency was needed because cable operators, working on their own, could not possibly scale this new service quickly enough. Already the local phone companies were preparing to roll out a new ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line) service at 10 Mbps data transmission on the existing copper wire telephone lines to homes—but almost all of it downstream.”