Techniques for aligning timing intervals across channels of a communication system, where each of the channels includes a number of cyclically-recurring time slots, each of the timing intervals includes one or more of the time slots, and each of the channels has one or more of the timing intervals associated therewith. A first one of the timing intervals, associated with a first one of the channels, is scheduled starting at a particular time slot of the first channel. One or more other timing intervals associated with the first channel are then scheduled by providing a specified inter-interval gap between timing intervals of each of one or more pairs of the timing intervals associated with the first channel. The scheduled timing intervals for the first channel are then copied to one or more of the other channels to provide alignment of the timing intervals across the channels. The timing intervals in an illustrative embodiment are initial-maintenance intervals (IMIs) of upstream channels in a DOCSIS-compliant CATV system.