Tony Cross, Chief Architect of Australia's NBN, has announced at the Broadband World Forum in London that the company has conducted its first trial of the new copper acceleration technology G.Fast and hopes to be in a position to launch the technology in 2017. The first G.Fast trial was done in an office building in Melbourne and achieved total throughput of 600 Mbps on CAT-3 cabling that was around 20 years old. According to Cross, NBN could not use the full G.Fast spectrum range in the trial because of active VDSL lines in the same bundle.
The G.Fast test in Melbourne was conducted using equipment from Alcatel-Lucent, and in separate testing work at its National Test Facility in Melbourne NBN has achieved speeds of 970 Mbps on copper lengths of around 20 metres. Cross said that the next step for NBN would be to launch further G.Fast trials in the first half of next year in partnership with retail service providers, in order to get a better understanding of how the technology would work in the field. He suggested the possibility to deploy it in apartment buildings by installing new equipment into the basement.
