Ultrafast broadband era emerges
But now the big challenge for the emerging ultrafast technologies such as G.fast is interoperability. At the Broadband World Forum in Amsterdam, the Broadband Forum is hosting the most advanced showcase of interoperable equipment and systems ever staged, on its Interoperability Pavilion.
This week, the Pavilion features 17 of the top vendors, test houses and industry bodies and is showing live examples of the latest G.fast technology, VDSL2 Vectoring, GPON and the Forum’s much-acclaimed TR-069 remote management protocol.
"Both standards and their implementation are a collaborative effort, and ITU-T is working closely with the Broadband Forum and others to help deliver both the protocols and the fast deployment of innovative technological developments such as G.fast. We are pleased to support this Pavilion as one example of our close collaboration," said the Director of the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Bureau, Mr. Malcolm Johnson. "Working together, ITU and the Broadband Forum can make sure the framework is in place to move to ultrafast rates."
G.fast is one of the main areas of focus on the Pavilion. It answers many of the deployment questions around the demand for faster broadband – giving Gigabit speeds without the Outside Plant (OSP) costs. It is essentially a "fiber to the periphery" solution, bringing fiber closer to the customer; typically to within 20-200m depending on the deployment scenario. G.fast is set to be very important, particularly as service providers look to provide services such as IPTV at 500 to 1000 Mbps.
As G.fast moves forward, the Broadband Forum has also selected the world’s first testing laboratory to certify products designed for G.fast deployment. It has chosen the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL), which has more than 25 years’ experience and major testing facilities.
"Interoperability of the G.fast and FTTdp solutions is essential to the rollout of these new technologies, and we’re working diligently with the Broadband Forum to quickly develop the test plans and certification program in step with the broadband industry’s first anticipated wave of G.fast products," said Lincoln Lavoie, UNH-IOL Senior Engineer, Broadband Technologies. "Our goal is to begin initial testing of G.fast products during the first half of 2015 and deliver the first certifications during the second half of the year, so service providers can assure the certified CPE and DPU devices selected for their first FTTdp deployment will be interoperable."
Robin Mersh, CEO, Broadband Forum added: "Operators have told us that interoperability will be key to the success of G.fast, so we are developing test plans based on their requirements, which UNH-IOL will certify based on those plans."
In addition to the Forum and the ITU-T, companies and organizations taking part include ADTRAN, Huawei, JDSU, Juniper Networks, UNH-IOL, Actelis, Sckipio, Lantiq, Keymile, LAN, MT2, Telebyte, Sagemcom, Alcatel-Lucent, EXFO, ADB and Ikanos Communications.
The opening of the Pavilion comes just after the latest broadband data from Point Topic showed that there are now more than 700 million fixed broadband subscriptions in the world, an improvement on the 0.8% growth recorded in Q2 2013.
Oliver Johnson, CEO, Point Topic: "Our latest data sees another milestone passed with steady growth in most countries. As we start to figure out how to use what we have, and perhaps more importantly how to coordinate the services and extract the synergies, we’ll see more and more positive outcomes in the coming years."
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