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Swiss beat UK's BT to next-gen G.fast broadband

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freelander:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-37705435

Switzerland is the first country in Europe to deliver so-called ultrafast broadband to customers through traditional copper infrastructure, according to service provider Swisscom.
It said 1,000 customers were now using a G.fast connection, which can reach speeds of 500Mbps.
G.fast lets copper cables carry data at faster speeds than before.
In the UK, BT's Openreach has been trialling G.fast technology, but customers can not yet buy packages

Hope this is ok here

Black Sheep:
TBH, I'm rather chuffed that other countries are sharing the limelight regarding G.fast technologies. It hopefully puts readers minds at rest that it's not a 'dead in the water' technology, as some would have you believe.

The only other slight point is ..... this is hardly breaking news, as the item was published almost 7 months ago !!  ;) ;D

Ronski:
There is a lot of life in g.fast so long as they roll out much further into the network, and get that copper/aluminium as short as possible.


--- Quote ---While Openreach is rolling out G.fast to its street cabinets, a continuation of its FTTC approach, Swisscom said it was hoping to install distribution points within 200m of homes
--- End quote ---

The Swiss know, I wonder if they have actually rolled out that close to homes though,  given its seven months on now.

Quote is from the article linked to in the first post.

Chrysalis:
Its all down to the loop length.

e.g. how would have FTTC been received by the public if it was only rolled out from the exchange or cabinets outside the exchange.

There is nothing ground breaking or innovative about these new variants of DSL, for the most part they simply just enable higher frequencies that have always been there to use.

The real and prime reason for improvements is the addition of fibre to the loop to shorten the distance dependent copper.  The design of g.fast would have been under the assumption it would be deployed closer to the home than VDSL, this is also evident by the fact BT had to get the spec changed so it suited their business model of deploying from VDSL cabinets.

WWWombat:
Actually, I think Telecom Austria beat both of them to the first proper subscriber.

Swisscom are in good shape for G.Fast: they already had a "Fibre To The Street, FTTS" model, where they were getting fibre within 200m of properties, but using VDSL2 DSLAMs. A model that lies somewhere inbetween BT's "Cab" model for VDSL2, and a pure FTTdp model.

Swisscom's intention, with Alcatel hardware, was for their current VDSL2 DSLAMs to be plug-compatible with a future G.Fast model. A drop-in replacement, hardware-wise. Not sure what will happen to existing subscriber packages though.


--- Quote from: Chrysalis on May 11, 2017, 03:23:48 PM ---this is also evident by the fact BT had to get the spec changed so it suited their business model of deploying from VDSL cabinets.

--- End quote ---

G.Fast itself didn't need much of a change to suit BT's longer ranges - just a higher aggregate power allowance, and bit-loadings of 13 or 14 (*). There were bigger changes needed in the business plans for DPUs - the nodes running G.Fast. Longer ranges imply more subscribers, more ports, higher vectoring demands ... and chipset designers needed to adjust their plans.

I suspect that BT don't intend for G.Fast to be *only* from the existing cabinets. In fact, the ANFP changes have been designed to cope with a multi-layered solution.

I suspect that  BT really changed from a DP-centric focus to one very similar to Swisscom's FTTS: their own "inbetween" variant. It is obvious that phase 1 of an inbetween variant starts with the existing cabs anyway.

(*) - These changes went through as part of amendment 2 of G.Fast. It created a new profile 106b for this purpose.

It looks like amendment 3 went through last month, which properly introduced a 212MHz profile, something for G.Fast to run on coax, and added the ability to dynamically shift bandwidth between downstream and upstream. I'm not sure if the latter is coax-only, or works on twisted-pairs too; the ITU specs are still locked away.

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