Sckipio Unveil 1Gbps Symmetric “Virtual Fibre” G.fast Broadband Tech

Israel-based Sckipio, which helped to create some of the kit that BT has used in their UK trials of 330Mbps capable hybrid-fibre G.fast (ITU G.9700/9701) broadband (roll-out plan), has today launched three new technologies that they hope will make the connectivity method more useful.

G.fast (technical summary) works in a roughly similar way to the current Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC / VDSL2) service that is already available across most of the UK, where a fibre optic cable is run from an exchange to your local Street Cabinet and then the remaining copper line to your home uses VDSL2 to deliver the service.

However Openreach (BT) intends to deploy the G.fast service from extension pods on the side of existing PCP street cabinets, although it could later be deployed from smaller remote distribution nodes that would be installed on top of telegraph poles, under manholes or inside buildings etc.

At present the ecosystem for G.fast is still fairly young, but developers like Sckipio are working hard to expand its features and use-cases. As part of that they’ve today unveiled three new technologies, which will expand the range of options available to operators’ that choose to deploy G.fast.

1. Single-Port “virtual fibre” 1Gbps G.fast Distribution Point Unit

The first new development is a single-port G.fast distribution point unit (DPU) reference design to provide up to 1Gbps of symmetrical broadband over existing coax and copper wiring, which is said to act like “virtual fibre” by extending GPON (fibre optic) networks with twisted pair copper or coax cable within big buildings (e.g. multi-dwelling units and single-family households).

The new reference design makes use of Sckipio’s Dynamic Time Assignment Technology (see below for more on this) to provide up to 1Gbps of broadband access in either direction and supports Microsemi’s reverse power feeding, which makes power supply less of an issue when installing the DPUs in building basements etc.

Apparently this new solution uses a very thin management layer for G.fast that allows operators’ to keep their existing GPON management layer and to extend it with a separate G.fast management layer. The joint reference design is said to have been built in conjunction with Intel and Microsemi.

2. Collective Dynamic Time Assignment for G.fast

Sckipio has also teamed up with Calix to announce the first deployment of their new Collective Dynamic Time Assignment (DTA) technology, running on a 16-port vectored G.fast DPU.

The technology, which boosts performance by “dynamically allocating the bandwidth in each direction in real time“, was actually announced under the different name of Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation (DBA) earlier this year (here), but at the time it could only run in low crosstalk environments, such as coax applications or single line scenarios.

However the enhanced CDTA solution can push G.fast further by adding support for the higher density, higher-crosstalk environments that arise when twisted pair bundles are present, which is closer to the network that you or I might experience via Openreach’s copper infrastructure in the UK.

The system is designed to listen for the demands of each consumer and to coordinate the upstream and downstream traffic to optimize the solution for the subscriber based on how he or she really uses broadband. CDTA analyses traffic across all the ports and optimizes the performance for the entire system to boost overall performance.

3. 24-Port G.fast DPU

Finally, Sckipio has teamed up with South Korean network kit maker HFR to announce what they claim is the “world’s first” G.fast DPU that supports up to 24 subscribers in a single DPU, although others are preparing similar kit for the commercial market.

The HFR solution supports the usual distributed vectoring capability and is optimized to deliver up to 500Mbps per subscriber, while also co-existing with 30a profile VDSL customers. A fair bit of VDSL2/FTTC style broadband exists in parts of the Asian markets and, not unlike in the United Kingdom, this is being pushed as a potentially viable upgrade path from VDSL.

Only a few months ago the South Korean telecoms operator, SK Broadband, even announced its intention to provide Ethernet speeds of up to 500Mbps with two strands (one pair) of existing copper telephone lines in old apartments via G.fast. It’s not all pure fibre optic FTTH/P over there after all.