DOCSIS employs a mixture of deterministic access methods for upstream transmissions, specifically TDMA for DOCSIS 1.0/1.1 and both TDMA and S-CDMA for DOCSIS 2.0 and 3.0, with a limited use of contention for bandwidth requests. Because of this, DOCSIS systems experience relatively few collisions, in contrast to the pure contention-based MAC CSMA/CD employed in older Ethernet systems (there is no contention in switched Ethernet).
For DOCSIS 1.1 and above the MAC layer also includes extensive quality-of-service (QoS) features that help to efficiently support applications that have specific traffic requirements such as low latency, e.g. voice over IP.
DOCSIS 3.0 features channel bonding, which enables multiple downstream and upstream channels to be used together at the same time by a single subscriber.