Hi
If G.fast isn't bringing fibre any closer to premises it seems a waste of effort and money. G.fast mainly improves on speed by using higher frequencies, but that also brings issues with interference to FM radio stations, so these higher frequencies will have chunks taken out of them to mitigate interference limiting the potential increases in speed. They could just turn up VDSL2 now to use 30MHz and boost speeds, although as vectoring has been a failure and the higher the frequencies get, the more cross talk on decades old telephone cable, speeds aren't going to be that much improved unless you are just metres from the cab.
G.fast was going to bring higher speeds to more people, by bringing the nodes closer to peoples homes in addition to using higher frequencies, but that is not seemingly going to happen now. People already on 80/20 are going to be less inclined to see the need to upgrade, but these are the people that G.fast will only significantly provide faster speeds to. Those on slower speeds due to distance from the cab, will still be on the slowest speeds on G.fast, might be faster than they are now if they are lucky, but still they are suffering the effects of distance.
So we are now to see yet more street furniture, and the benefits of faster headline speeds falling in an even tighter radius to fewer people than VDSL.
I wonder if anyone has ever done a cost breakdown to see how all these hacks in order to push data through cables only ever designed for voice, compares to what it would have cost just to have gone full FTTP at the start of "broadband" as we know it.
A small fortune must have been spent upgrading exchanges to ADSL1, then upgrading them again to ADSL2+, then installing VDSL cabinets, and now G.fast cabinets, all of which are running concurrently now needing electricity and maintenance. It has to be false economy, of course I suspect it is us the consumer paying for it.
Regards
Phil