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ITU Readies New 1Gbit/s Broadband Standard
G.fast Uses Existing Wires to Deliver Fibre Performance at Lower Costs
Geneva, 16 July 2013 – G.fast, a new ITU broadband standard,
that promises up to 1 Gbit/s over existing copper telephone wires, is one step
closer following a meeting of ITU-T Study Group 15 this week. G.fast is designed
to deliver superfast downloads up to a distance of 250 meters, thereby
eliminating the expense of installing fibre between the distribution point and
people’s homes.
The Geneva meeting saw first stage approval of ITU standard, Recommendation
ITU-T G.9700, that specifies methods to minimize the risk of G.fast equipment
interfering with broadcast services such as FM radio, paving the way for G.fast
to be approved in early 2014.
G.fast is expected to be deployed by service providers wanting to provide
fibre to the home (FTTH) like services, which will enable flexible upstream and
downstream speeds to support bandwidth-intensive applications such as streaming
Ultra-HDTV movies, uploading high-resolution video and photo libraries to cloud-based
storage, and communicating via HD video.
Hamadoun Touré, Secretary-General, ITU: “Since the early days of the World
Wide Web, people around the world have accessed the vast resource that has
become the Internet via ITU standards. I applaud our membership for continuing
to show great leadership in the development of these specifications that bring
broadband into our homes at ever increasing speeds and at ever greater
efficiencies.”
The G.fast work has attracted active participation by a large number of
leading service providers, chip manufacturers, and system vendors.
An important feature of G.fast is that it will enable self-installation by
consumers without a technician’s assistance. For service providers, self-install
eliminates the expense of deploying technicians to the consumer’s home, thereby
also improving the speed at which they can rollout new services. Consumers will
benefit from not having to arrange to be at home for a technician’s visit.
“G.fast is an important standard for service providers globally,” said Tom
Starr, chairman of ITU-T Study Group 15, Working Party 1, which oversees the
G.fast effort. “Service providers will be able to deliver fibre-like performance
more quickly and more affordably than with any other approach.”
“G.fast provides the speed of fibre with the ease of installation of ADSL2,”
said Les Brown, Associate Rapporteur of the G.fast Experts Group.
The new G.fast standard is being coordinated with the Broadband Forum’s
system architecture project, Fibre to the Distribution Point (FTTdp). The ITU-T
and Broadband Forum have been working closely to ensure that G.fast solutions
can be quickly placed into FTTdp deployments.
Video interview with Frank van der Putten, Rapporteur, Question 4, Study
Group 15: http://youtu.be/bXg_vRaFBpg
For more information,
please contact:
Sanjay Acharya
Chief, Media Relations and Public Information, ITU
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Toby Johnson
Senior Communication Officer, ITU
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