Alcatel-Lucent and BT today announced a G.fast consumer trial in northeast England.
The BT trial will cover up to 2000 homes in Gosforth, near Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and will last six to nine months. It comes after a smaller pilot conducted by BT and Alcatel-Lucent around Hethersett in Norfolk, earlier this year.
Alcatel-Lucent will devote to the trial access technology including bonded VDSL2, VDSL2 vectoring, per port selectable VDSL2 or G.fast service activation, and system level G.fast vectoring.
The companies are claiming customers will get speeds up to 330 Mbps during the trial, speeds the companies deem necessary with the expected increase in bandwidth demands from video consumption over IP.
“The latest analyst predictions say that within five years, something like one million minutes of video content will cross the global fixed or mobile network every single second. The demand for broadband has never been greater and is only heading in one direction so this G.fast trial is the right technology at the right time,” Cormac Whelan, CEO of Alcatel-Lucent UK & Ireland, said in a statement.
Alcatel-Lucent says G.fast can enable faster broadband speeds without the need for fiber to the premise or rewiring buildings.