Gfast map
Dark Blue: Firm commitments from incumbent: BT (10M), Belgacom, Australian NBN, Swisscom, Austria, Bezeq Israel, Chunghwa Taiwan, Telus Canada, Telekom South Africa, SK Korea, (U.S.) AT&T, Century, Frontier, Windstream, Belgium, Omantel
Mid Blue: Smaller carriers in Germany, Norway, Finland, Japan
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Swisscom betting on G.fast across the country
- Published: 19 September 2018 19 September 2018
CTO Heinz Herren is publicly confident that G.fast - usually at a gigabit - is right for the company's future. "Now that we have the new generation of chips, the time is right," he said in the keynote at Huawei's UBBF in Geneva. The new chips can use 212 MHz of spectrum and deliver fast upstream and downstream. They will be deployed to most of the country other than the third already covered with FTTH.
The challenge, of course, is Xavier Niel's Salt, offering a ten gig connection for 50 Swiss francs, US$52, to 1.3 million homes about a third of the country and growing rapidly. I stopped in a Salt store in Geneva and asked how people were responding to the 10 gig. With enthusiasm, I was told.
I doubt there is much practical difference. between, say, 200 meg and 10 gig. The experience worldwide is that people do want the higher speeds if the price is similar.
Zurich, the largest Swiss city, only has a population of 400,000 people and an unknown number of gnomes.
Adtran: G.fast selling to DT, nbn Australia, AT&T, Italia, and Century.
- Published: 03 September 2018 03 September 2018
Maybe the British Telecom cutback did not imply a trend. At Adtran's event, they discussed growing deployments at major companies. They also are seeing demand for 35b VDSL. Germany is ready to turn on 10M lines of 35b.
nbn told me last year they were headed to G.fast and now are installing. nbn is $2B more behind budget but expects to be completed in 2020. Although the government has changed, the nbn is not changing deployment plans. FTTN or G.fast to the remaining sites.
AT&T has been doing some G.fast outside their incumbent territory, They are actively competing for housing complexes nationwide. They have (finally) integrated G.fast into their OSS/BSS software and now are ready to use G.fast in-territory. John Donovan says they are doing 5M homes passed with FTTH in the next year. If he didn't misspeak, any G.fast would be beyond that 5M.
British Telecom replaces 3M G.fast with 3M fiber
- Published: 13 August 2018 13 August 2018
Clive Seeley likes fiber and so does the British government. They are hiring 3500 engineers to do the installs. They've now cut 3M lines from their world-leading G.fast rollout and will go to fiber. BT, DT, and Verizon have been holding back from fiber to the home. BT & DT have changed their mind. (Verizon is using mmWave.) Iain Morris heard this from BT:
1M Ports of G.fast ship, $150M annual run rate
- Published: 22 July 2018 22 July 2018
Alam Tamboli of Dell'Oro reports ~891,500 ports shipped by the end of Q1, which implies over 1M in Q2. The 2018 year over year growth looks to be 80%. He also expects an annual run rate of over $150M/year by the first quarter of 2019, plus the cpes. That's good news for a segment that has been exceedingly disappointing. That may be because telcos are waiting for the new chips with a nominal speed up to two gigabits.
Adtran also has encouraging G.fast news. Australia is ready to take substantial volumes. AT&T finally appears ready to use G.fast in district, having solved the software integration problems.
Dell'Oro separately notes that wireless base stations sold well in Q1. That's consistent with the well-known buidup of Verizon's 5G mmWave network, soon to turn on. They expect an actual decline in service provider switches and routers in 2018, as prices go down faster than traffic volumes go up.
Germany confirms 35b at "up to 250 megabits" to be available to 10M by yearend
- Published: 10 July 2018 10 July 2018
Years late, DT is now satisfied 35G VDSL systems are working well enough to start selling it to customers. In a rare move, DT is also promising a minimum speed of 100 megabits. This is the same service as KPN is advertising as 200 megabits although DT's network probably has longer loops. Based on public information about DT's network, many will not achieve 250 megabits.
35b VDSL is easy to explain. It the same thing as the popular 17b VDSL but uses 35 MHz of spectrum. Alcatel, Broadcom, and others thought the small change meant it would be available in 2016. It's much slower than G.fast, but should work well with DT's existing VDSL.
Something went wrong, apparently with the vectoring software.
BT passes 1M homes with G.fast
- Published: 26 June 2018 26 June 2018
Actual connections quite few. The prices remain high at £10-£15 more expensive than the VDSL service. They apparently do not want many to sign up yet as they add new areas and build operating systems.
By March 2019, they intend to have passed 2.2M. That's about 6-9 months behind a schedule that would take them past 10M homes in 2020. That said, they are far ahead of anyone else.
Self-install isn't ready for them. They won't even trial self-install until late this year.