BT trialling G.Fast broadband in Cambridgeshire

A total of 2,000 consumers will be served by the current trial over the course of the next few weeks.

BT Group PLC on Tuesday said it has begun its first field trial with its new ultrafast broadband technology, dubbed G.fast, in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire.

Competitors have called for the division to be separated from BT in the past over concerns surrounding the fairness of BT both running telecom services and controlling the infrastructure over which the services are run, with rival Sky PLC having said that there would likely be “significant net benefits from establishing Openreach as an independent company”.

G.fast is essentially a halfway house between fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC), which now delivers a maximum download speed of 80Mbits/sec, and full-blown fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP), which is now pegged at 330Mbits/sec, but has the ability to deliver speeds of 1Gbit/sec and beyond.

Further trials are set to take place in Gosforth, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and Swansea, Wales, from September.

“BT was keen to stress that the trial is being delivered by its Openreach wholesale division, and is thus “…open to all communications providers on equal terms”.

G.fast changes the way today’s broadband is transmitted, delivering ultrafast speeds that now require fibre to be run all the way to the premises (FTTP).

On Tuesday the United Kingdom incumbent reiterated that if the trials are successful it will look to a wider G.fast deployment in 2016-17 as part of a plan to make 500 Mbps broadband available to most of the United Kingdom within a decade.

“In real networks I think G.Fast is going to be “an up to 1 Gbps” technology at best”, commented Ian Keene, VP at Gartner. We want to stay ahead of the competition and so it’s good to see this continued investment and innovation in the industry. It is working on the trials with worldwide vendors ADTRAN, Alcatel-Lucent and Huawei, and also with chipset manufacturers and global standards bodies, to drive the speed and performance of G.fast technology.

The company has pioneered research into G.fast technology since 2007 and has been heavily involved in driving the creation of global industry standards in that time.

United Kingdom regulator Ofcom is conducting a strategic review that will amongst other things examine the prospect of a full structural separation of BT and Openreach. We’re now eager to support all our service providers in learning how customers enjoy the service.