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Swiss incumbent to use new copper tech for final drop in fibre-to-the-street network.
Swisscom this week claimed to have launched Europe’s first commercial G.fast service.
The Swiss incumbent is using the technology in its fibre-to-the-street (FTTS) network, where fibre is deployed to a distance of around 200 metres from the building, with copper used for the final drop.
1,000 G.fast connections are already up and running, a spokesman for the telco explained in an email to Total Telecom. "According to our current planning there will be about 100,000 G.fast connections by the end of 2017," he said.
The service is available with Swisscom’s Vivo L and Vivo XL broadband tariffs, which cost 149 francs (€137) and CHF169 respectively per month.
Swisscom has been operating pilot G.fast services with select customers since May 2015, having first conducted field trials a month earlier.
Using G.fast technology "will allow Swisscom to quickly and cost-effectively provide high transmission speeds up to 500 Mbps," the telco said in a statement.
The rollout is part of Swisscom’s medium-to-long-term plan to provide 85% of Swiss premises with at least 100 Mbps broadband by the end of 2020. It aims to reach this objective by deploying a mix of FTTS, fibre-to-the-building (FTTB), fibre-to-the-curb (FTTC), and fibre-to-the-home (FTTH). By the end of June this year, Swisscom’s fibre-led networks had passed 2.2 million premises.
Swisscom’s G.fast launch comes the same week that a new Ovum report predicted that the number of G.fast connections worldwide will reach 29 million by 2021. Western Europe is expected to account for approximately 11% of those connections, the analyst firm said.
This story was updated at 08:20 on Thursday 20 October to include further detail provided by Swisscom.
