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UPDATE Sckipio Claims to Double the Distance of Ultrafast G.fast Broadband

Thursday, Feb 5th, 2015 (9:05 am) - Score 2,437

Israel-based semiconductor company Sckipio, which last year became the first manufacturer to release commercial hardware for the next generation hybrid-fibre G.fast (ITU G.9701) broadband technology that BT is also hoping to roll-out in the United Kingdom from 2016/17 (details), claims to have already doubled the technology’s reach.

In theory G.fast can deliver up to Gigabit (1000Mbps) level performance, but the technology’s hunger for more radio spectrum and its dependence upon copper cable means that you’d have to be sitting practically on top of a distribution point in order to receive that kind of performance.

As a practical example BT conducted a mock-up field trial of G.fast last year (full details here and here) and on the shortest 19 metre copper line they managed to achieve aggregated speeds of around 1000Mbps (Megabits per second), which equated to 231Mbps upload and 786Mbps download. By comparison the so-called “long66 metre line produced 200Mbps upload and 696Mbps download.

The above trial, which was in an ideal environment with no VDSL/FTTC co-existence clash (the real-world experience will be more challenging), partly explains why the operator’s official roll-out promise is for “most homes” to expect speeds of ‘up to’ 500Mbps (Megabits per second) instead of a Gigabit. BT has yet to run trials using commercial grade hardware (these are due to occur in the summer), but we strongly suspect that their deployment methodology would need to keep within 100 metres in order to work as promised.

Take note that in a real-world deployment G.fast would require BT to bring the fibre optic cable even closer to homes than it does today and that’s likely to form part of their strategy (e.g. installing G.fast nodes on telegraph poles, inside manholes and even inside existing street cabinets). So anything that could improve coverage would be a bonus as this would mean you could reach more people with the same performance and thus for less money.

Now Sckipio claims to have “successfully demonstrated“, albeit only as part of a laboratory trial, a tweaked version of G.fast that “doubles the official ITU targets” for the technology by delivering speeds of greater than 500Mbps over 200 metres of copper cable and more than 200Mbps at 400 metres (the 400m figure is particularly impressive for G.fast). However it’s unclear if this is just on the download or aggregated with upload.

David Baum, CEO of Sckipio Technologies, said:

G.fast was optimized to deliver up to 1Gbps in short distances. Yet, we tuned our technology to allow telcos to reach more customers with higher performance from farther away.”

Apparently the firm’s initial test results are described as being preliminary and Sckipio expects additional performance improvements as the solution is further optimized, although it’s unclear whether Sckipio is merely tweaking the existing hardware within specification or if its changes would require a new revision to the official standard. We’ll reserve judgement on this until more detail is released.

Sckipio’s primary problem in all this is that they’re not as big or as well recognised as the major manufacturers of similar kit, although markets can change and if their product meets the requirements of the big boys then anything is possible.

In the meantime it’s worth putting the predicted improvement into context by looking at a chart of vanilla G.fast performance, which comes from a trial that Alcatel-Lucent conducted all the way back in 2013 (details).

gfast and vectoring 2.0 fttc vdsl2 speeds

UPDATE 8th Feb 2015

Just a couple of notes and amendments to make on our article above. Firstly, it should be said that the Alcatel-Lucent chart above assumes performance above VDSL (starting at 17MHz, not at 2MHz). Sckipio has also been in contact to clarify that the performance they shared was based on utilising “the full” G.fast spectrum (i.e. this assumes VDSL/FTTC isn’t co-existing with G.fast and thus isn’t sharing the same spectrum).

Regarding the question of download-only or download and upload, Sckipio confirms that the speeds they report are a combination of both download and upload (aggregated speed). This is less impressive than if it were purely download, although delivering 200Mbps via G.fast at 400 metres even as an aggregate is still a big achievement for how this technology works.

On the other hand the raw VDSL2 standard, with modern vectoring methods, could potentially achieve something similar at aggregate if pushed. However VDSL2 will never achieve G.fast speeds when going closer to the home and a G.fast deployment would seek to put people closer to a distribution node rather than further away, thus delivering ultrafast speeds.

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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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