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Gigabit Copper Broadband One Step Closer as Sckipio Outs First G.fast Kit

Tuesday, Oct 7th, 2014 (3:06 pm) - Score 1,030

Israel-based Sckipio appears to have become one of the world’s first manufacturers to produce hardware that is fully compliant with the ITU-T’s G.fast recommendation (G.9700/1), a technology that BT recently demonstrated as having the capability to deliver broadband speeds of up to almost 1000Mbps via existing copper telephone lines.

On the surface G.fast is quite similar to FTTC, except that in order to get the most out of it you need to bring the fibre optic cable even closer to homes (i.e. by using Fibre-to-the-distribution-point) and then distribute the service from smaller distribution points (mini street cabinets); ideally the remaining run of copper cable between the dp and homes would be less than 250 metres (shorter copper = less interference and faster speeds).

BT believes that G.fast, which could one day replace the current ‘up to’ 80Mbps FTTC “fibre broadband” technology on their network, is “very promising … with significant potential” and they’ve already conducted a small scale trial with three homes near to their Adastral Park engineering HQ in Ipswich (details here and here).

But BTOpenreach’s trial was arguably more of an alpha demonstration than a proper trial because at the time they had no access to final hardware, which had been predicted to start surfacing towards the very end of this year. The good news is that Sckipio appears to be matching their earlier predictions (here) and have just introduced the “world’s first G.fast modem chipset” – DP3000 G.fast DPU Chipset and CP1000 G.fast CPE Chipset.

The DP3000 G.fast DPU Chipsets simultaneously supports four 1Gbps G.fast ports, up to 10Gbps of aggregated backhaul and full built-in Vectoring support (i.e. this works to remove crosstalk interference on the copper line) for as many as 64 subscribers.

Sckipio has also introduced two reference designs supporting its new chipsets: DP3016-EVM – a 16-port G.fast DPU reference design for use in FTTdp architectures and CP1000-EVM – a CPE bridge design for integration into residential gateways or for creation of stand-alone bridges. Various companies including Suttle, XAVi, Zinwell, Lantiq and VTech will make use of this.

Robin Mersh, CEO of the Broadband Forum, said:

G.fast is a very important part of the next generation for last-mile broadband access, which is based around our Fiber to the Distribution point (FTTdp) architecture. Many of our members are excited to test and deploy G.fast-based solutions as soon as possible.”

As ever though, it’s important to caution against high expectations. The VDSL2 (FTTC) standard promised speeds of up to 200Mbps, yet in reality it usually only manages to deliver a little less than half that to those within optimal reach; while those who live further away from their street cabinet tend to get significantly less than half.

Real-world implementations of G.fast will suffer their own problems and the focus on the theoretical 1000Mbps could thus end up causing confusion. In reality G.fast will need to co-exist with other services in BT’s network and deal with all of the usual problems that the last 250m or so of copper wire could create. If trends follow, and we believe they will, then it’s probably more realistic to expect sub-400Mbps speeds, which would still be impressive.

But all of this depends upon BT’s chosen implementation and before that they’ll need to run more trials, which means that G.fast won’t be arriving anytime soon. We’ve always felt that 2017 might be more realistic, although there’s also the heavy cost and lengthy deployment time to consider; not forgetting the potential impact of future political pressure for more upgrades.

On top of that Openreach might well prefer for other hardware manufacturers, with which they have existing relationships, to show their G.fast kit before they start making decisions about future trials.

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Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and .
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