Patent ID: 7782898

Claim:
A system, comprising: a Cable Modem Termination System (CMTS) configured to establish a logical wideband channel extending to a remote wideband cable modem over a plurality of downstream Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) channels, wherein the logical wideband channel originates from within a Data Over Cable System Interface Specification (DOCSIS) network extending between the CMTS and the remote wideband cable modem; wherein the CMTS includes Vertical Alignment Indexes (VAIs) in packets to identify temporal positions of the packets in the plurality of QAM channels; the wideband cable modem configured to receive and decode the logical wideband channel, wherein the logical wideband channel spans across a first combination of some of the QAM channels at a first time and a second different combination of some of the QAM channels at a second later time; and the wideband cable modem configured to monitor all the QAM channels for the packets having a particular packet identifier value that correlates said packets to the logical wideband channel, to track dynamic utilization of the QAM channels by the logical wideband channel over the different times according to the monitoring; wherein the wideband cable modem is configured to use the VAIs to temporally realign the packets received over the different QAM channels.