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Ultrafast throughput achieved over 30 metres of copper; speed drops to 5 Gbps at 70 metres.
Australia’s state-owned broadband wholesaler NBN has become the latest telco to test XG-Fast, reaching 8 Gbps in a lab test carried out with Nokia.
The two companies recorded the speed on a 30-metre-long twisted copper pair, typically deployed in the field. The throughput fell to 5 Gbps when the length of copper was increased to 70 metres.
"Although XG-Fast is still in its very early stages of development, the lab trials we have conducted demonstrate the huge potential that the technology offers," said Dennis Steiger, CTO of NBN, in a statement.
"XG-Fast gives us the ability to deliver multi-gigabit speeds over copper lines – virtually on a par with what is currently available on fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) – but at a lower cost and time to deploy," he said.
XG-Fast works in a similar fashion to G.fast, which uses a much larger frequency range to transmit data over copper. Where G.fast uses a range of 106 MHz, reaching speeds of up to 500 Mbps, XG-Fast uses up to 500 MHz and can reach speeds of more than 10 Gbps.
However, the trade-off is that the performance of XG-Fast drops off significantly at distances of more than 100 metres, whereas G.Fast can sustain better performance over longer lengths of copper.
"We are committed to further developing the [XG-Fast] technology to eventually support 2 Gbps or more at 100 metres, enabling longer distances to effectively cover buildings and clusters of homes without the need to rewire," said Federico Guillen, president of Nokia’s fixed networks unit.
Tuesday’s announcement was made a day after an NBN-backed report by Ovum predicted that global G.Fast connections will reach 29 million by 2021, representing almost 3% of the fixed broadband market.
NBN first trialled G.fast in October 2015, and plans to deploy the technology next year.
