At least 100 million people will subscribe to gigabit services by 2020, according to a new report from Point Topic, the CEO of which indicated G.fast will likely be an important carrier technology to help get us there.
"G.fast clearly works best economically in a mature market with copper in the local loop so I expect most of today's leading markets will have some G.fast in the next five years and some should see coverage approaching 50 percent of the market," said Point Topic CEO Oliver Johnson.
Sometimes fiber to the subscriber is the best fit to support broadband services for residential and small and medium businesses. However, existing copper continues to have an amazing ability to expand to meet broadband requirements. Indeed, copper-based technologies such as VDSL2 vectoring, Vplus, and G.fast can support bandwidth rates of 100, 300mbps or even 1gbps.
The average bandwidth required for a residential area can vary significantly. A study by Alcatel-Lucent suggests that the current upper bound broadband access rate is about 50mbps and will be 100mbps by 2020. A Bell Labs study for a major operator in Western Europe indicates 40mbps is sufficient for triple play resident services there. And a study by U.K. government regulator Ofcom reports that average fixed residential broadband subscribers get 22.9mbps, and that broadband with a minimum download speed of 30mbps is available to three-fourths of subscribers only has seen 21 percent penetration.
“For residential and SMB subscribers, high-speed copper technologies can deliver bandwidth in excess of current and anticipated demand,” Mohamed El-Sayed, consulting manager of the network strategy and technology evolution practice of Bell Labs, said recently.
AT&T, the ONOS project, PMC-Sierra, and Sckipio last year joined forces to demonstrate CORD using G.fast access. CORD, which stands for central office rearchitected as a data center, is a concept that combines the cloud, commodity infrastructure, NFV, open building blocks, and SDN to bring the agility of the cloud and the economies of scale found in the data center to service provider networks – spanning from the equipment at the home or office customer premises, to the access part of the network, to the telco’s central office. Key components of CORD include commodity hardware, NFVI orchestration (XOS, Openstack), an Open Leaf Spine Fabric, an SDN Control Plane (ONOS), simple on-premises customer premises equipment and virtualized CPE, virtualized access (PON OLT MAC + vOLT), virtualized BNG, and virtualized functions.
Edited by
Maurice Nagle
