NBN Co and Nokia set to go extremely XG.FAST at 5Gbps

Dennis Steiger, chief technology officer of NBN Co, has announced in a blog post that "it will be launching lab trials of ground-breaking new broadband technology XG.FAST that promises to deliver extraordinary speeds" up to 5Gbps and beyond – "with trial speeds potentially in excess of 5Gbps on a pair of copper lines."

Australia’s NBN Co "will be only the third operator in the world to trial the new ground breaking XG.FAST technology", with Streiger saying NBN Co’s engineers are "working alongside Nokia over the coming weeks to assess the potential for this fascinating technology".

So, what is XG.FAST? It is ADSL and VDSL injected with copious amounts of growth hormones and steroids, so its offspring come out looking like Arnold Schwarzennger but already grown and rippling with muscles.

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On a more serious note, Steiger tells us that "XG.FAST is basically the next generation of copper technology — the new sibling for G.Fast if you like — and promises to deliver speeds over copper that were unimaginable only a few years ago".

BT in the UK was doing XG.Fast trials in October last year, hitting speeds of 5.6Gbps over 35 metres of copper in lab trials.

Deutsche Telekom (DT) followed suit in February this year and hit 8Gbps over 50 metres of copper in the laboratory, with both tests using technology from Nokia, according to Steiger.

So, it should come as no surprise to see Steiger state that it "is in great company when it comes to testing out XG.FAST and exploring the potential for it to deliver multi-gigabit speeds* to the over six million premises on the NBN network that will initially be served by either Fibre-to-the-Node (FttN) or Fibre-to-the-Building (FttB) networks".

Internet Australia chief executive Laurie Patton says the organisation "applauds efforts by NBN to trial new technologies".

However, Patton "maintained that before being deployed any new technology must be guaranteed to deliver solutions able to provide speed and reliability — upload as well as download — comparable with fibre, now and in the future, and with a comparable ROI".

Patton said: “Otherwise, we will still be building an inferior broadband service that won’t be fit-for-purpose in the long run. Our concern with the (multi-technology mix) MTM model has always been that it will not last the distance and will have to be replaced at great cost by a future government.

“What needs to be understood is that even if it is proven to work XG-FAST will not eliminate the need to replace the copper wires in the FttN network in 10 to 15 years' time.

“XG-FAST is only expected to work over very short distances. It requires fibre to be run to the edge of the premises / driveway (FttDP)“.

He said: "IA maintains that NBN Co should abandon FttN and return to building a 21st century broadband network capable of delivering the bidirectional gigabit-per-second speeds that are now possible and will increasingly be demanded over the decades-long lifetime of this critical infrastructure."

Steiger states that NBN Co "will be testing out XG.FAST over the coming weeks to see how this technology works over a range of different types of copper cable in order to get an idea of how XG.FAST might work in the field".

We are warned to "expect to see varying speeds during the lab trial, dependent on the type of cable being used".

So, what of the FttDP future – and when will XG.Fast actually be deployed?

The sad news is that "XG.FAST will not be ready for commercial deployment for several years", with Steiger saying "we are really only at the starting gates for this technology, so there is a long way to go before we could potentially implement it on the NBN network."

That’s a shame. The good stuff always seems to be years away, just like the NBN’s completion.

However, says Steiger, "XG.FAST could offer us a much faster and cost effective way to deliver multi-gigabit speeds to premises on our network in the future, aside from trying to connect them all to Fibre-to-the-Premises (FttP) technology."

To be absolutely clear, says Steiger, "in order to deploy XG.FAST we would need to drive our fibre deeper into the network and move to a Fibre-to-the-Distribution-Point (FttDP) network architecture with XG.FAST using only the last 30-100 metres or so of copper into a premises.’

Steiger says NBN Co’s "primary goal is to continue with our current deployment of the FttN/B network in order to get Australians on board the NBN network as fast as possible, but once that is completed we then have the potential to look at how we might push fibre deeper via FttDP in order to deliver ultra-fast speeds via XG.FAST".

Of course! Once NBN 1.0 is complete, NBN 2.0 "Upgrade Edition" will commence being installed.

In any case, Steiger assures us that "the arrival of XG.FAST is still great news because it means we would potentially have the ability to eventually deliver multi-gigabit wholesale speeds across our fibre, co-axial and copper lines that run into end-user premises.’

Steiger also assured that G.Fast isn’t going anywhere yet, with most operators still gearing up to release G.Fast in the first place, with XG.Fast only ready for trials, not deployment yet.

Worldwide trials have occurred, with NBN Co having already successfully conducted its first G.Fast trial last October in Melbourne, and is in "the process of organising further field trials later this year and remain very interested in deploying G.Fast on the NBN network".

So, what’s next?

Steiger says that following the recent NBN results and new plan, "the NBN network is really starting to scale up now, including on the FttN/B portion of the network".

He adds that "it won’t be long before we expect to have one million premises of the six million FttN/B premises on the network ready for service (RFS)."

Steiger explains "that shows how fast we can ramp up the NBN network rollout once we leverage existing infrastructure and we expect we will be making six million premises RFS across the network by June 2018 – meaning we can then serve approximately 75% of all Australian premises via the NBN network."

He concludes, stating: “Once we have got those foundations of the network in place and can deliver most Australians a wholesale broadband connection of at least 25/5Mbps — although most will be able to receive much faster wholesale speeds — then we can turn our attention to start delivering the kinds of ultra-fast speeds that may be delivered by these newly emerging technologies.”