Sckipio Pushes G.fast Copper Line Broadband Speeds to 3.1Gbps

Israel-based Sckipio, which helped to build some of the kit that Openreach (BT) piloted as part of their 330Mbps G.fast broadband rollout, has today demonstrated over 3.1Gbps of download speed (900Mbps upload) on production silicon using G.fast bonding at 212MHz.

Last month the company took a big step forward after they became one of the first to launch a chipset based off the ITU’s new Amendment 3 to the G.fast standard (here), which doubles the spectrum frequency to 212MHz and also supports other changes like coordinated Dynamic Time Allocation (cDTA).

Today the company moved to demonstrate some of these improvements at the Broadband World Forum event in Berlin (booth E101C), where they teamed up with software company Civica. The setup involved two bonded pairs of CAT-3 wiring (“regular copper telephone wires“) in a network that should in theory be able to hit a top speed of 4Gbps (Gigabits per second).

The demonstration used Sckipio’s new SCK23000 chipsets, Civica’s WanStaX software and the Microsemi WinPath network processor. But crucially we are not given any information about distance (how long was the copper line?).

David Baum, Co-founder and CEO of Sckipio, said:

“Sckipio is pushing Gfast to astonishing speeds with production silicon. No other Gfast solution delivers end-to-end 212a profile bonding.”

Openreach’s recent Fibre-to-the-distribution-point (FTTdp) based test of pole mounted G.fast distribution points from NetComm Wireless also made use of 212MHz to achieve Gigabit class speeds (here) and bonding could certainly take such performance further in the future.

However at the moment the technology is somewhat hobbled by its limited port count (up to 48 per cabinet, rising to 96 in the future) and ordinary consumers tend to be discouraged by the high pricing of bonded solutions, which is why they have remained more the preserve of SME business connectivity.