First Customers Live on BT 500Mbps G.fast Broadband Trial in Huntingdon

As expected BT has confirmed that their first large-scale (2,000 premises) live customer trial of future G.fast broadband technology (ITU G.9701), which will initially offer Internet speeds of up to 330Mbps (rising to 500Mbps in the future), have begun in the market town of Huntingdon (Cambridgeshire).

The 6-9 month trial involves hardware and services from several major international vendors, such as ADTRAN, Alcatel-Lucent and Huawei. On top of that around 8 ISPs are currently taking part, such as Zen Internet (here), AAISP and Merula among others. A further trial is planned for Gosforth (Newcastle) and a smaller “technical trial” for Swansea (Wales) from September 2015.

BT has previously spoken of its hope that the new service could start its 10-year commercial roll-out to “most homes” in 2016/17, although today’s announcement reiterates the operators warning that this may not happen unless “UK regulation continues to encourage investment” (i.e. they don’t want Ofcom to split out Openreach). However, assuming G.fast proceed, then the roll-out would most likely focus on the operator’s more lucrative urban and sub-urban areas (i.e. the first 60-70% or so of UK premises).

On top of all this BTOpenreach are also testing a 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) upgrade and various tweaks to their long-stalled Fibre-on-Demand (FoD2) product, which allows small businesses and rich home workers with deep pockets to cover the cost of having a pure fibre optic line built directly to their property (this is only available in certain FTTC areas that have been enabled for FoD).

Joe Garner, CEO of BTOpenreach, said:

“Today is the start of a new chapter in building Britain’s connected future. This is the largest trial of G.fast technology in the world and it builds on the pioneering research of BT’s world-class R&D teams.

We conducted the world’s first G.fast trial in 2013, and our experts have been heavily involved in creating global industry standards for this technology. We’re now eager to support all our service providers in learning how customers enjoy the service.

The people of Huntingdon will play an extremely important role in helping us gauge how the technology performs, and how we might deliver ultrafast speeds to more of the UK over the coming years.”

John Whittingdale, Culture Secretary, said:

“The UK already leads Europe when it comes to superfast broadband coverage and speeds, with around 40,000 more homes and businesses getting access every week thanks to the government rollout.

We want to stay ahead of the competition and so it’s good to see this continued investment and innovation in the industry. BT is harnessing its world-class technology and engineering expertise to help the UK lead the way on ultrafast broadband and remain a world leading digital economy.”

In fairness Whittingdale is not entirely correct when he states that “the UK already leads Europe when it comes to superfast broadband coverage and speeds” as a number of states in Europe actually have superior fixed line infrastructure performance to ours (Sweden, Netherlands etc.), although we are broadly above the major states like Germany, France, Spain and Italy. Usually the Government makes that distinction in their PR, but this time they seem to have forgotten.

It’s also worth noting how BT confirms that “various methods of deployment” will be tested as part of the trial in order to “provide a valuable insight into how the technology can be used on a day-to-day basis, including how usage might grow over time“. We’ll explain a bit about the deployment approaches below.

How Does G.fast Work?

G.fast works in a roughly similar way to the current 80Mbps capable Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) service that dominates the UK market (many ISPs market this as “fibre broadband“), except that it requires significantly more radio spectrum (FTTC= 17MHz vs G.fast 106MHz+) and thus needs to operate over a much shorter run of copper cable (ideally less than 350 metres).

The service can reach several million premises by being installed inside / alongside an existing street cabinet, although in other situations (i.e. where the property resides further away) then Openreach’s high capacity fibre optic lines may need to be moved even closer to homes. At this point the fibre may be taken to a smaller remote node or distribution point (FTTdp), which can also be built on top of a telegraph pole or possibly even put underground.

Currently we still don’t know much about Openreach’s deployment plan or the likely service costs (it will probably sit somewhere between FTTP and FTTC), although the whole purpose of such trials is to establish the real-world costs, spot bugs and identify the most economically viable deployment method or hardware choice.

However BT will be playing a game of catch-up in this field because Virgin Media are about to double their top speeds from 152Mbps to 300Mbps and they’ll complete the deployment to around 45% of UK premises by early 2016, long before G.fast’s commercial roll-out has even begun. Virgin’s network is also being expanded to 17 million premises by 2020 (60%+ of the UK) and even faster speeds will follow via Gigabit capable DOCSIS 3.1.

Never the less it’s worth noting that both approaches will require a significant investment in order to deliver upon what they’ve promised, with Virgin Media investing around £3bn. The figure for BT is not yet known (that’s what the trials are for), although it’ll still be significantly cheaper than rolling out a pure fibre optic (FTTH/P) network.

On the other hand there’s always the prospect of that last little bit of copper in G.fast’s mix causing significantly slower speeds in some areas, it all depends upon what deployment approach the operator chooses (e.g. will they limit the copper run to 350 metres or push that figure higher to cover more people, albeit with a big hit to performance?).

Openreach has also setup a new website for the trial service (here), although it contains very little detail.

UPDATE 9am

Changed the article picture to one from the G.fast trial.

UPDATE 27th August 2015

We also picked up on the related announcement from Huawei, which added this little nugget of information: “The G.fast trial located in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, has been deployed using Huawei’s latest multi-port G.FAST temperature-hardened and waterproof equipment installed in a manhole. In addition to G.fast equipment, Huawei also provides a full end-to-end solution, including a headend optical line terminal (OLT), G.fast terminal, and a network management system. Another key enabler for this technology is the remote power solution which Huawei has provided for this trial as well as the commercial deployment of Fiber to the remote node (FTTRN). With this, the need to deploy fiber to the home is mitigated and users can obtain the same ultra-broadband services experience as fiber, to enjoy applications such as multiple 4KTV streams.”