Huawei achieves gigabit speeds on copper DSL

Most people know that the next big thing when it comes to broadband is fibre. A lot of broadband providers made use of copper to lay down their networks before and are now slowly deploying fibre and upgrading their cabinets.

However, BT Broadband spoke up a few weeks ago that their copper networks can still be used to provide high-speed broadband services to their users. This was explained by Sean Williams, who is BT’s director of strategy, policy and portfolio. During the Westminster e-Forum, he stated that the company was not shutting down their copper networks, saying: “Copper is a permanent feature of our network. There will be people who want copper telephony and not broadband.”

Now Huawei is following suit and has actually showed that gigabits are achievable on copper. However, it involves more than just the regular copper networks we have today. Huawei’s setup requires time division duplexing in order to achieve an overall upstream and downstream rate of a gigabit of a single twisted pair. Such speeds, however, are only achievable up to a distance of a hundred meters.

With this technology, Internet service providers won’t need to lay down new cable in order to wire homes and provide them high-speed broadband services. Huawei, in their press release, stated: “By using low-power spectral density in-signal transmission, Huawei’s Giga DSL prototype reduces radiation interference and power consumption, and provides a total upstream and downstream rate of one Gb/s within 100 meters, and 500 Mb/s-plus within 200 meters — making it a cost-effective option for telecom operators building ultra-broadband access networks.”

The release went on to state: “Huawei also recently announced the successful development of the world’s first node level vectoring (NLV) prototype. Huawei’s vectoring product provides 100 Mbps access over a single twisted pair in FTTC/FTTB, and has been tested and commercially trialed with many leading telecom operators. This, along with the company’s latest prototype, Giga DSL, signifies that DSL technology still has great potential to meet the requirements of broadband users for ultra-high-speed access in the future.”

Source – Gigaom