Swisscom announced on Monday that a select group of customers has been field testing G.fast, enjoying connection speeds of up to 500 Mbps over copper.
The Swiss incumbent is in the midst of €1.6 billion upgrade of its fixed infrastructure, using a combination of fibre-to-the-home (FTTH), fibre-to-the-street (FTTS), fibre-to-the-basement (FTTB) and vectored VDSL. The company ended 2014 with 1.4 million premises connected to its upgraded network. It aims to increase that number to 2.3 million by the end of 2015.
As part of this plan, Swisscom plans to deploy G.fast for all customers covered by its FTTS and FTTB networks from 2016.
With that goal in mind, the telco began field-testing the technology in Bibern – a small village with a population of approximately 250 – in April.
"Since the end of April 2015, the first customers have been able to surf at speeds of up to 500 Mbps even if they do not have an FTTH connection," said Swisscom, in a statement.
G.fast works by transmitting data over copper at a higher frequency. It is very susceptible to crosstalk so must be deployed in concert with vectoring.
At distances of less than 100 metres, and on good quality copper, G.fast has reached speeds in excess of 1 Gbps. However, its efficacy drops off considerably at distances of 100 metres or more. As a result, G.fast is seen as a means to augment a deployment of fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC), FTTB, or similar.
