BT and Alcatel-Lucent hit 5 Gbps over copper broadband
G.fast, which has been pioneered by BT and industry partners since 2007, is an important breakthrough as it enables ultrafast broadband to be delivered but without the disruption and expense of laying fibre all the way to a home or business. This means it can be rolled out more quickly and to a much larger number of premises, ensuring as many people benefit as possible.
G.fast technology is at the heart of plans for Openreach, BT’s local access network business, to deliver ultrafast speeds to 10 million premises by the end of 2020, and to most of the UK by the end of 2025. It will transform the speeds currently delivered by the company’s Fibre to the Cabinet technology and will form part of Openreach’s ultrafast product range, which also includes ultrafast Fibre to the Premises technology in certain areas; in addition to dedicated business lines which are available throughout the UK and which already deliver speeds of up to 100 Gbps.
G.fast is currently being trialled by Openreach in Huntingdon and Gosforth. Triallists are receiving speeds of up to 330 Mbps downstream, more than ten times the current UK average. If the trials prove successful – and if UK regulation continues to encourage investment – Openreach aims to start deploying G.fast in 2016/17 alongside its fibre-to-the-cabinet and fibre-to-the-premises services. The company expects speeds to rise to up to 500 Mbps as the technology is rolled out across the country.
XG.FAST, a potential future development of the technology, is in the early stages of lab testing, but has exceeded expectations in trials at Adastral Park, BT’s global research and development campus in Suffolk, and Alcatel-Lucent’s labs in Antwerp.
It delivered aggregate speeds of 5.6 Gbps over 35 metres of BT cable, a record for full-duplex data transmission over a standard single BT line at this distance. The technology also performed well over longer distances, with aggregate speeds of 1.8 Gbps over 100 metres; a significant result, as most UK homes are within this distance of their local distribution point, be that a pole or footway box.
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