Openreach Pause UK Trial of G.INP Fix for ECI FTTC Broadband Cabs UPDATE2

Openreach has paused a trial of Physical Retransmission ReTX (G.INP) technology for their troublesome ECI based FTTC “fibre broadband” street cabinets. The technology works fine on their Huawei estate but ECI has long been the naughty child, although their trial is expected to continue next year.

G.INP (ITU G.998.4) is essentially an error correction solution that is designed to help resolve spikes of Electromagnetic Interference (impulse noise), which can impact the stability and performance of VDSL2 lines (FTTC). The introduction of this technology can, on some lines, also produce a small increase in service speed.

In June 2017 we received some good news after Openreach announced that they may have finally found a solution to the long running problem of getting G.INP to play nice with their ECI estate (here) and we understand that the trial finally started on 25th September 2017. This was due to run until December 2017, although a new announcement states that the trial has been “paused” (here).

The related briefing is private but we hope to get a bit more background from our contacts in the near future. Suffice to say, ECI has long been a problem area for new FTTC upgrades and so it wouldn’t surprise us if Openreach were still having trouble getting it to work.

UPDATE 1:53pm

We understand that this pause is temporary and will last until sometime in early 2018, which is largely attributed to the Christmas and New Year break.

In other words the trial should continue and Openreach are currently examining the initial rollout to 30,000 lines. Once resumed the plan appears to be for this to be extended to 570,000 lines, which suggests more of a wide-scale pilot than a limited trial.

UPDATE 1st Feb 2018

We understand that so far the ECI Retransmission Trial has migrated around 600,000 lines and the official rollout is about to commence across their estate. The xdB (3dB profile) has also been successfully applied to some ECI lines.