The plugfest held in early June at the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory was designed to give equipment manufacturers developing remote Distribution Point Units (DPUs) and Customer Premises Equipment (CPEs) an opportunity to test and benchmark the interoperability of their products prior to full certification testing. A total of 14 companies participated. The plugfest follows earlier events for chipset manufacturers that began in January 2015, where seven manufacturers were able to test the interoperability of their implementations. The next events in the series will resume in July, with the manufacturers again coming together to test.
The ITU-T’s G.9701 (G.fast) specification was approved in December 2014 and is designed to provide gigabit broadband connection speeds (up to 1Gbps) over a single twisted pair cable in an existing copper infrastructure. It allows faster deployment of services by enabling the introduction of plug-and-play remote DPUs and G.fast CPE devices self-installed by customers at home.
Sckipio Technologies was one of the participants in the plugfest and has also just presented its new line of G.fast reference designs to support CPE modems inside a SFP pluggable form-factor, what it claims is an industry first. The company also announced a first CPE bridge reference design designed with reverse power injection for use in powering distribution point units via reverse power-feeding. The announcements were made in conjunction with the TNO Ultrafast Broadband Seminar in The Hague, co-hosted with the Broadband Forum.
Other participants in the plugfest included Adtran, Alcatel-Lucent, Arris, AVM, Broadcom, Calix, Huawei, Ikanos, JDSU, Lantiq, Metanoia, Realtek Semiconductor and Technicolor, while test and measurement equipment was providedby Sparnex Instruments and Telebyte.
