DOCSIS
acronymISP & telecom
The standard that turns cable-TV coax into broadband, sharing spectrum among a neighborhood of modems under one CMTS scheduler.
Versions 3.0, 3.1, and 4.0 mark the gigabit march; upstream was historically the scarce direction.
DOCSIS carries data over the coaxial cable television plant, sharing spectrum with the video channels it was designed around. That inheritance explains its characteristics: a shared medium per node, capacity divided among everyone on that segment, and an upstream historically much smaller than the downstream because the original plant was built to send, not receive.
Successive versions widened it substantially, and the version most relevant operationally is the one addressing latency rather than throughput. Bufferbloat on cable was severe enough to make an otherwise fast connection unusable for interactive work, and the active queue management introduced to fix it improves the experience more than another increment of headline speed. Node splits remain the physical answer when a segment is oversubscribed.