Europe’s telecoms operators are increasingly turning to technologies like G.fast to help them to deliver more bandwidth into consumers’ homes, but as yet they cannot be sure that those consumers really need the additional speed.
The services that require gigabit broadband speeds have not yet been created, attendees at the inaugural Gigabit Copper eve nt in Munich noted on Wednesday.
"The killer app at the moment is the speed test," said Werner Heinrich, director of product management at Adtran.
"We don’t have the services today…[but] the services will come," he said.
Video and 4K televisions are starting to have an impact, and "8K is on the horizon", Heinrich said. He also pointed out that growth in cloud services will drive the need for symmetrical bandwidth. By 2020 1 Gbps broadband "will be mainstream," he predicted.
However, others take a more conservative view.
As it announced earlier this year, BT plans to make G.fast an integral part of its broadband vision, using the technology to provide 500 Mbps broadband to much of the U.K. in the next decade.
In terms of customer demand, "several hundred megabits is probably about right," Trevor Linney, head of access network research at BT said.
However, he explained that providing higher bandwidth for limited periods to meet particular needs will be part of the evolution of copper extension technologies going forward. For example, downloading a 4K video brings "a very intense burst" of activity on the network that will require high bandwidth, but most of the time that customer will not need more than a few hundred megabits per second.
Meanwhile, there are lessons to be learnt from other markets.
Operators in Japan and Korea were ahead of Europe in rolling out high-speed networks, but "the stickiness of services in those countries is not what people think it is," warned Robin Mersh, CEO of the Broadband Forum. In some cases, people have signed up to 100 Mbps broadband only to later downgrade to 50 Mbps because they don’t want to pay for what they are not using, he said.
While the services that require high bandwidth are not around today, "that’s not say they won’t come along," Mersh said.
Nonetheless, the executives agreed that copper will be able to serve the needs of many users for a number of years.
"Copper will be there a long time," said Adtran’s Heinrich. "G.fast is not the end of what we can do on copper."
His peers agreed.
"There is more to come," Linney said, while Mersh noted that telcos are talking about leveraging their copper assets for at least the next decade.
"10 years [is] on the conservative side," he predicted.
