BT and Alcatel-Lucent have revealed that they have completed trials of a new form of G.Fast technology that can deliver speeds of more than 5GBps.
The two companies said “early experimental lab trials” of XG.Fast delivered 5.6GBps over 35 metres of cable and 1.8GBps over 100m.
The trials were carried out at at Adastral Park, BT’s global R&D campus in the UK, and A-L’s labs in Belgium.
The operator is currently undertaking customer trials of regular G.Fast tech, which is expected to deliver speeds of 500MBps in the future.
BT has said it hopes to deploy it in 2016/17 should the trials be successful, but did not indicate if or when XG.Fast would become available.
The announcement comes as the operator continues to be put under pressure from rivals who are deploying fibre all the way to the home and regulators who are toying with the idea of hiving off BT’s Openreach division.
Mike Galvin, Managing Director of Next Generation Access for BT’s Technology Service & Operations division said: “These are exciting results.
“We know that G.fast will transform the UK’s broadband landscape but these results also give us confidence the technology has significant headroom should we need it in the future.
“Fibre to the premises technology has a role to play – and Openreach has the largest such network in the UK - but G.fast is the answer if the UK is to have widespread and affordable ultrafast broadband sooner rather than later.
“Those who argue otherwise aren’t being realistic and should look at Australia where the authorities have changed tack on their fibre deployment and followed our example.”
Source: http://www.eurocomms.com/industry-news/11088-bt-alcatel-lucent-announce-5gbps-g-fast-trials