International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has formally approved the G.fast standard that intends to deliver broadband speeds between 500Mbps to 1Gbps over traditional copper cables found between fibre-equipped street cabinets and homes / businesses.
Cheaper than fibre to the premises (FTTP), the G.fast standard provides the means to use existing infrastructure to deliver greater broadband speeds. However, one of the major drawbacks of the technology is that as the distance increases the download and upload speeds decrease.
This is evident from the tests conducted by BT in UK at its Adastral Park research lab in Ipswich. Over a 19m copper cable, BT’s tests achieved download speeds in tune of 786Mbps while uploads were recorded at 231Mbps. However, as the distance was increased to 66m, the download speed fell to 696Mbps and so did the upload speed at 200Mbps. Over a distance of 250m it falls further to 150Mbps.
Despite this decline in speeds, the 66m length is considered to be the typical distance between street cabinets and homes or businesses – meaning that consumers will be able to receive much faster broadband connection at a fraction of the cost of FTTP.
ITU secretary general Hamadoun Touré revealed that G.fast’s approval to implementation could be one of the fastest till date as far as access to technology is concerned. “A range of vendors has begun shipping G.fast silicon and equipment, and service providers’ lab and field trials are well underway”, he said.
ITU said in a statement that G.fast will enable implementation of bandwidth-intensive applications and services including IPTV, 4K video streaming, advanced cloud-based storage solution, HD video conference among others.
“The standard will comfortably serve the broadband access needs of small-to-medium enterprises, with other envisioned applications including backhaul for small wireless cell sites and Wi-Fi hotspots”, ITU added.
Despite Touré’s optimism, it will still take a year for the technology to go main stream. The Broadband Forum is planning a test suite and certification programme facilitating communication providers to test their kits for interoperability and performance.
Further, a beta run of the certification programme has already been planned for mid-2015 and if this goes as planned, certified G.fast deployments could be seen by the end of 2015.
