Austrian telco trials G.fast as 'interim solution'

Commercial services planned for 2016, long-term plan calls for fibre

Telekom Austria is the latest outfit to trumpet the virtues of the yet-to-be-ratified G.fast standard, announcing that a deployment trial conducted with Alcatel-Lucent achieved speeds beyond 100 Mbps per household.

The deployment trial covered multi-storey apartments covered by Telekom Austria subsidiary A1, with the carrier saying it's eyeing the technology to service the thousands of apartments in cities like Vienna, so as to delay the upgrade to fibre.

In the carrier's canned announcement, Telekom and A1 CEO Hannes Ametsreiter said: “Fibre to the home remains our long term vision, but we consider G.fast as an intelligent interim solution”.

The announcement notes that G.fast is best suited to apartment living, since “the length of the copper lines should not exceed 250m”, so the trial focussed on fibre to the basement, as NBN Co and TPG are deploying in Australia.

In the long run, Telekom Austria hopes to connect as many as 400,000 Viennese households using the technology. While new apartments in the country already use fibre-to-the-premises, “there are tens of thousands of old buildings where customer premises wiring would only make sense within the framework of a more comprehensive renovation”, the company says.

A1 hopes that commercial G.fast services could be launched some time in 2016.

Chipset-slinger Sckipio agrees, having recently announced the availability of G.fast chipsets for local nodes and customer premises equipment. ®