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Comment by aphistic | Hacker News Reader

(*) If you're within 50m of the fiber.

One of the big hurdles that FTTP faces is getting the fibre into the customer's house. Perfectly doable, but expensive to achieve. G.Fast enables the upgrade to ~gigabit speeds without needing to drill through brick walls and/or ensure that the customer is at home.

That and multi-dwelling units (i.e. apartments and condos) where property owners won't spring to run fiber everywhere.

I am happy to be home at anytime if it means I get Fibre. As OP mentioned these technologies are only really suitable in specific cases such as in apartment buildings. In a suburban environment no one will ever see gigabit speeds.

You might well be a reliable customer and at home for the engineer visit, but not all of the general population is quite so helpful!

The head of BT's R&D group gave a presentation in Cambridge yesterday. Slide 15 of his deck shows real world speeds ranging from 700Mbps-1000Mbps for vectored G.Fast obtained in a live suburban environment: http://cwbackoffice.co.uk/Presentation/PrestigeLecture_21.10...

I think those values are optimistic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.fast#Performance says that the speeds reported are actually shared between uplink and downlink. Furthermore this was in laboratory conditions. Most people have copper lines that are at least 20 years old.

One way to get around customers not being home is to make Fibre rollout opt-out. Then only wire Fibre to the outside wall of every customers house. At a time that suits them they can organise a tech to come out and complete the connection.

Those values are measured in real-world conditions, not the lab - they've deployed to 3 homes in a housing estate near Ipswich from one distribution point - though I believe that you are correct in saying that they are aggregate throughput.

You can't dig up peoples' gardens without permission! That suggestion also requires 2 separate truck-rolls, and still relies on someone being home for the appointment to complete the connection. Of course it can be done - is being done - but relying on the customer increases the cost.

We're getting hooked up at home with FTTP this month with Gigaclear. Up to 1000Mbps symmetric up and down.

But still 600Mbps at 200m. It seems like it could still offer substantial improvements for most subscribers.

It would be interesting to see a graph of distance/speed comparing it with regular DSL.

*repeater

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