Patent ID: 8457156

Claim:
An apparatus, comprising: a wideband cable modem configured to receive and decode a logical wideband channel received over a plurality of downstream Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) channels, wherein the logical wideband channel spans across a first combination of some of the downstream QAM channels at a first time and a second different combination of some of the downstream QAM channels at a second later time; and the wideband cable modem configured to monitor all the downstream QAM channels for packets having a particular packet identifier value that correlates said packets to the logical wideband channel, to track dynamic utilization of the downstream QAM channels by the logical wideband channel over the first and second times according to the monitoring; wherein the correlated packets include Vertical Alignment Indexes (VAIs) to identify temporal positions of said packets in the plurality of downstream QAM channels, and wherein the wideband cable modem is configured to use the VAIs to temporally realign the packets received over the first combination and the second different combination of the downstream QAM channels.