Swisscom claims world's first G.fast broadband service

Swisscom reckons it's become the first carrier in the world to announce a G.fast service.

The telco hasn't said how long the rollout will take, nor how many households are within its preferred maximum copper run of 200 metres, but its CTO Heinz Herren told an audience at Broadband World Forum (BWF) the build has commenced.

Its canned statement says that beginning last month, it has only installed G.fast-compatible kit. Currently, it's installing nodes that serve 16 households at a time, but Swisscom anticipates support in 48-port units, and that will let it expand the rollout to fibre-to-the-basement (FTTB) deployments.

The company reckons it gets “up to” 500 Mbps speeds on its G.fast infrastructure (which has been in design and pilot for four years).

The rollout is expected to reach two-thirds of the country's nearly 3.4 million households.

LightReading reports from BWF that Herren reckons 100 Mbps should be enough for anyone, but the carrier is making sure the network design will let it pull fibre out to premises if need be.

Swisscom has worked with Metanoia Communications and Huawei to develop a field upgrade for existing customer routers.

There are still roadblocks in the broader G.fast world, but one of those, interoperability, was also a focus of attention at BWF.

Calix, Digital Lightwave, Huawei, Metanoia Communications, Technicolor (which bought Cisco's service provider video CPE business last year) and Telebyte got together at the forum for an interop test.

Convened by the University of New Hampshire's InterOperability Lab (which runs the Broadband Forum's G.fast certification tests), the interop demo covered products using Sckipio, Metanoia and Broadcom chipsets.

The Broadband Forum has further G.fast plugfests scheduled for November and January. G.fast certifications are expected to arrive during 2017. ®