XG.Fast delivers 8Gbps over copper in NBN lab trials

NBN reveals results from tests with Nokia

NBN has achieved speeds of up to 8 gigabits per second over 30 metres of copper using XG.Fast, the company announced today.

The peak aggregate speed over twisted-pair was achieved during lab tests of the emerging standard. NBN has been trialling the technology in conjunction with Nokia. The two companies also achieved up to 5Gbps over 70 metres, which NBN says is about three times the length of the average copper lead-in to an Australian home.

NBN chief technology officer Dennis Steiger said that although the standard is in its “very early stages of development,” the lab trials demonstrated its “huge potential”.

“XG.Fast gives us the potential ability to deliver multi-gigabit speeds over copper lines — virtually on a par with what is currently available on fibre to the premises — but at a lower cost and time to deploy,” the CTO said in a statement.

NBN and Nokia announced in August that they would collaborate on XG.Fast trials. (Nokia became NBN’s fixed network partner after its acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent.)

NBN is Nokia’s third customer globally to trial the technology — BT and Deutsche Telekom have also run XG.Fast trials — which involves increasing the spectrum used to as much as 500MHz compared to the 106MHz used by G.Fast, which is another standard for broadband over copper.

NBN has also conducted trials of G.Fast. (The company previously said it could potentially bring services based on G.Fast to market in 2017.)

Steiger has indicated that XG.Fast could potentially be used as part of NBN’s fibre to the distribution point (FTTdp) rollout

Last month NBN announced it would not be using Optus’ hybrid-fibre coaxial (HFC) assets outside of one area in Queensland where they are currently used to provide National Broadband Network connections.

Instead NBN said it planned to proceed with a larger than expected rollout of FTTdp, overbuilding the areas within the Optus HFC footprint. Up to 700,000 premises are expected to be connected using FTTdp.

FTTdp, also called fibre to curb, involves rolling out optical fibre significantly closer to end users’ premises than the fibre to the node (FTTN) technology used elsewhere in the network. Like FTTN, it relies on copper phonelines for the final connection to end users’ premises.

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Tags broadbandNokiaNetworkingnbn conational broadband networkNational Broadband Network (NBN)

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