Broadband Forum completes G.fast standard plugfest with 14 CPE, network equipment vendors

The Broadband Forum has wrapped up its G.fast equipment plugfest as part of its ongoing program to drive widespread G.fast certification.

Held earlier this month at the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory's (UNH-IOL) facilities in Durham, New Hampshire, the G.fast plugfest gave vendors developing remote Distribution Point Units (DPUs) and Customer Premises Equipment (CPEs) an opportunity to test and benchmark the interoperability of their products prior to full certification testing.

The forum said that a total of 14 chipset and equipment vendors participated in the event, illustrating the growing level of interest in G.fast technologies following the approval of the ITU-T'S G.fast standard in December 2014.

Participants included ADTRAN GmbH, Alcatel-Lucent, ARRIS, AVM GmbH, Broadcom, Calix Inc., Huawei, Ikanos, JDSU, Lantiq GmbH & Co. KG, Metanoia, Realtek Semiconductor Corporation, Sckipio Technologies and Technicolor. Sparnex Instruments and Telebyte provided additional test and measurement equipment for the event.

This latest plugfest comes after an earlier event in January where seven chipset vendors gathered in January to test the interoperability of their implementations. The next events in the series will resume in July, with the manufacturers again coming together to test.

In December 2014, the ITU-T approved the G.9701 (G.fast) specification, which is designed to provide gigabit broadband connection speeds (up to 1 Gbps) over a single twisted pair cable in an existing copper infrastructure. It allows faster deployment of services by enabling the introduction of plug-and-play remote DPUs and G.fast CPE devices self-installed by customers at home.

Momentum for G.fast among service providers such as AT&T (NYSE: T) and BT continues to ramp.

Indeed, last year BT said it achieved downstream speeds of about 800 Mbps and upstream speeds of over 200 Mbps in its own G.fast trial. On longer lines of 66 meters--a distance that it said encompasses about 80 percent of such connections--the telco reported speeds of around 700/200 Mbps.

For more:
- see the release

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