Australia’s NBN on Wednesday became the latest telco to jump on the G.fast bandwagon, announcing a successful trial with the aim of commercially deploying the technology in 2017.
"W e have conducted our first G.fast trial in an office building in Melbourne and achieved total throughput of 600 Mbps on CAT-3 cabling that was around 20 years old," said Tony Cross, chief architect at NBN.
Had other VDSL lines in the same bundle not been in use, he explained, then NBN would have been able to use G.fast’s full spectrum range and reached speeds of around 800 Mbps. In separate tests at its facility in Melbourne, the company reached 970 Mbps on lengths of around 20 metres. The equipment was supplied by Alcatel-Lucent.
Cross said G.fast gives NBN greater flexibility.
"We could deploy it in apartment buildings by simply installing new equipment into the basement. We could supply a group of houses via a fibre-to-the-distribution-point (FTTdp) model or even just a single premises if need be," he said.
"G.fast really allows us to remove the need to actually enter premises to deliver ultra-fast speeds – that has always been the major barrier to delivering a full fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) solution," he said.
NBN plans to trial G.fast with retail service providers (RSPs) in the first half of 2016, to better understand how the technology can be used in the field.
"With G.fast we think RSPs could offer end-users a range of product plans including symmetrical speeds of, for example, 300 Mbps download and upload, something that would hold great value for commercial end-users who wanted to have access to extremely fast upload speeds," Cross suggested.
NBN’s announcement comes a day after BT revealed it has tested G.fast’s big brother, XG.fast, which uses an even broader frequency range to deliver speeds of multiple gigabits per second over copper.
In tests at its Adastral Park R&D centre, the U.K. incumbent reached 5.6 Gbps over 35 metres of BT cable, and 1.8 Gbps over 100 metres.
On Wednesday, Cros s applauded BT’s efforts, adding that "we look forward to learning from them and other global operators about this very exciting technology as we look to bring better broadband to all Australians."
