The most significant aspect of Terayon Communication Systems Inc.'s recent push into systems infrastructure may not be what it says about the company's desire to push out from modems into both chips and networks, but what it says about the changing nature of the cable TV industry consortium CableLabs. Terayon has hired three of the most senior officials in CableLabs' efforts to turn cable traffic to Internet Protocol traffic.

Former CableLabs chief technology officer Richard Prodan said that the Terayon triple-header is not that unusual-several executives at the consortium have left for industry positions. It is not that CableLabs has outlived its usefulness, he said, but that the organization is turning more to interoperability and promotional issues.

The cable modem effort formerly known as Docsis, for example, is on a bit of a plateau with release 1.1, which specifies packet prioritization methods for handling voice-over-IP calls in a cable modem environment. The Docsis 1.2 effort by Terayon and Broadcom to define an advanced physical layer is still active, with strong arguments being made for TDMA and S-CDMA modulation, Prodan said. But on the implementation front, the cable operators are stuck at very early Docsis 1.1 stages. Meanwhile, Docsis itself has become an adjunct to the PacketCable process.

And here's the real rub-PacketCable director Ed Miller followed Prodan over to Terayon, precisely at a time when VoIP in the cable industry is faltering, in part due to the soft economy and the difficulty in challenging regional phone carriers for local phone service. At the recent National Cable TV Association show, Junko Yoshida of EE Times described how much of the PacketCable work was shifting to soft-switch definitions. But multiple standards bodies already are working on soft-switch concepts, so CableLabs would have little more than a consulting role in a soft-switch definition for cable operators.

A similar situation exists for OpenCable and CableHome. Both efforts involve expanding the reference-design definitions for set-top boxes or residential gateways, but both require interaction between multiple alliances and standards bodies.

CableLabs' importance as a consortium is scarcely diminished, but its ability to single-handedly set de facto standards like Docsis is largely a thing of the past. In normal times, that would remove one edge that cable operators had over competitive carriers offering DSL. But since most such carriers died in the first half, the only ones to benefit from the transition of CableLabs are the good old incumbent Baby Bells. Aren't you happy?