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BT Claims Future G.fast Broadband Delivers 300Mbps Speeds at 350 Metres

Thursday, Jun 11th, 2015 (9:46 am) - Score 6,088

The CTO of BT’s Wholesale division, Colin Bannon, has revealed that their future G.fast (ITU G.9701) broadband technology has also been tested on longer copper lines of 350 metres and the operator found that at this distance it was still able to deliver Internet speeds of 300Mbps.

Earlier this year BT unveiled tentative plans for a decade long deployment of G.fast technology, which will start around 2016/17 and should eventually make download speeds of up to 500Mbps available to “most homes” across the United Kingdom (here and here). G.fast is theoretically capable of 1000Mbps+, but you’d have to be practically sitting on top of a node to get that.

The solution is loosely similar to the operators current 40-80Mbps capable Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) technology, except that it requires significantly more radio spectrum (FTTC 17MHz vs G.fast 106MHz+) and must thus operate over a much shorter run of copper cable (ideally less than 200 metres).

As such any homes or businesses that exist further away than the ideal distance (BT has yet to set a firm upper threshold for this) would require G.fast to be used in combination with other methods (e.g. FTTdp / FTTrN), which shorten the final copper run by effectively bringing high capacity fibre optic cable even closer to homes. After this the service would be distributed from smaller nodes, which could be installed on top of telegraph poles, inside street cabinets or even underground.

g.fast broadband bt network diagram

BT are currently preparing a new round of major G.fast trials in three locations – Huntingdon (Cambridgeshire), Gosforth (Newcastle) and a smaller scale technical trial in Swansea (Wales). But until now most of BT’s early G.fast trials (here), at least those we’ve heard about, have only spoken about the technology’s performance over short distances (i.e. 100 metres of copper or less).

The early alpha trials revealed that initially you’ll probably have to live within around 50 metres of a G.fast distribution point in order to receive the promoted 500Mbps, while you’d need to be sitting at about 20 metres for 1000Mbps (231Mbps upload / 786Mbps download) and the speed falls away quickly as the copper line distance grows.

gfast trial bt results

The above tends to reflect a best case scenario, where G.fast has access to its entire spectrum and doesn’t have to share some with existing FTTC (VDSL) services as that can have a hugely negative impact on performance. But we’ve heard precious little about what BT’s G.fast trials can do beyond 100 metres, until now.

However the figures given by Bannon, which indicated that strong speeds of 300Mbps were possible at 350 metres, are also reflective of early trials and thus another best case scenario (note: we are not certain if this figure is also aggregate performance or not). In the real world it won’t be quite so easy.

Never the less BT’s results are impressive because some early predictions had indicated that you’d need to be a lot closer (just below 200 metres) in order to get G.fast to deliver 300Mbps, yet BT’s early trials seem to now indicate that the technology may have even greater reach than first thought. Mind you Israel-based semiconductor company Sckipio has already hinted at this before (here), although their kit wasn’t being used in the BT test.

Unfortunately the original Lightreading article doesn’t say much more than that, except to confirm BT’s view of G.fast as an “economic game-changer” and they’re “aggressively pursuing additional standards” so that the final deployments will “get a lot better” than seen in their un-optimised trials. Everything else revealed by Bannon’s speech was already touted by BT’s Chief Network Architect, Neil McRae, in April (here).

The speed point of 300Mbps is important since this appears to be the target performance for BT’s forthcoming G.fast trials, perhaps because if they can deliver the service at 350 metres in the real-world then that would be very economically viable (i.e. installing the kit inside or alongside existing FTTC street cabinets to cover millions of lines within that distance).

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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