Manufacturers continue to enhance the broadband speeds that copper phone wiring can support using the Gfast standard. Sckipio today said it demonstrated Gfast speeds of 3.1 Gbps downstream and 900 Mbps upstream at the Broadband World Forum in Berlin. The demonstration used two copper pairs bonded together.
In an email to Telecompetitor, Sckipio Vice President of Marketing Michael Weissman said the demo was over “a short distance” copper link.
“Over longer distances the rates will decrease (as you would expect),” he wrote. “At 100 meters, achieving 2 Gbps of aggregate capacity is easy to meet.”
Gfast Speeds
Sckipio does not manufacture end products but instead supplies the silicon that other companies use to build finished products. According to a press release, Sckipio is the only company offering production silicon delivering end-to-end 212a profile bonding.
As Weissman told Telecompetitor recently, 212a profile bonding expands the portion of spectrum within a copper connection that can be used for Gfast to up to 212 MHz. The previous maximum limit was 106 MHz.
Gfast 212 MHz Transmission
The Sckipio news comes just one day after Calix introduced two products that support 212 MHz transmission. These include a Gfast node that the company said is the first 48-port Amendment 3 offering, along with a remote Gfast node with a sealed DPU. Calix reports this solution is being trialed with a North American tier 1 operator.
“Businesses require very high speeds like Sckipio is enabling,” said industry analyst Teresa Mastrangelo, Principal Analyst at Broadbandtrends LLC in a Sckipio press release. “Leveraging bonding of Gfast at 212Mhz will create a very lucrative and transformative opportunity for operators.”
Gfast technology is expected to be an important element of most U.S. telcos’ plans for increasing broadband speeds, especially within the MDU segment. One exception is Verizon, which plans to forgo Gfast and rely on fiber-to-the-premises and fixed wireless for high-speed broadband. CenturyLink, Frontier, and Windstream have active trials with Gfast, and AT&T reportedly has big plans for the technology as well.
This post has been updated.
Image courtesy of flickr user Sean MacEntee.
