Telekom Austria Group subsidiary A1, which serves the Austrian market, announced a recent demonstration carried out with partner Nokia in the city of Vienna during which transmission rates of more than 10 Gbit/s were achieved over installed copper cable in A1's fixed line network.
A1 noted that the record speed was made possible leveraging an advance in the existing copper-based G.fast technology, specifically XG-FAST. The recent test conducted in Vienna utilised a 30-metre copper cable and test equipment supplied by Nokia Bell Labs and demonstrated that the existing copper cables between the street or basement of a building to houses of apartments can potentially support speeds in excess of 10 Gbit/s.
XG-FAST technology uses the final span of the existing copper network to deliver super-fast Internet to homes and offices. A1 stated that the test shows that in the near future existing network infrastructure can be used to bring ultra-high-speed broadband to the customers without the need to install new fibre into buildings.
A1 noted that it is constantly evaluating new technologies as it seeks to address rising demand for bandwidth from its customers. G.fast and XG-FAST technologies are suitable for FTTB expansion in residential areas, particularly where the installation of new fibre lines would be too costly or is impractical. Under this model A1 installs fibre lines to a node in the basement of the building or close to the property, which is then connected with the existing cabling.
In late 2015, A1 selected Nokia/Alcatel-Lucent to transform the fixed ultra-broadband network utilising its fixed access, IP routing and optical transport solutions to enable an accelerated roll-out of high-bandwidth services and help it to meet Austria's national broadband initiative objective of connecting 99% of homes with speeds of 100 Mbit/s. A1 was to deploy solutions including G.fast and Vplus ultra-broadband access technologies for FTTB/FTTC deployments.
In December 2016, A1 and partner Nokia announced that as part of the advance towards 5G they had achieved a data rate of 513 Mbit/s over the A1 live network on a mobile router and 463 Mbit/s on a smartphone at Austria's University of Klagenfurt. The trial involved 3 carrier aggregation with frequencies in the 2.6 GHz, 1800 MHz and 800 MHz ranges, plus 256QAM modulation.
Regarding the latest trial, Sascha Zabransky, director, group technology and future services at Telekom Austria Group, said, "In urban areas in particular, demand for ultra-high-speed broadband services with rates in excess of 100 Mbit/s is growing faster than an area-wide fibre infrastructure can be completed… XG-FAST enables fibre-speed Internet over existing telephone copper wires… the long-term vision is to bring fibre to every home, (but) XG-FAST serves as a bridging technology".
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