“As the industry continues to embrace G.fast, its success in broadband networks absolutely depends on service providers having a wide choice of equipment and this is where interoperability comes in,” the Broadband Forum’s Marketing Director Mark Fishburn observes. “The Broadband Forum’s collaboration with the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory aims to address exactly this issue and a huge amount of work is going on at the moment to achieve true G.fast interoperability.”

Fishburn spoke on the requirements for delivering G.fast at this week’s ITU Telecom World 2016 in Bangkok during the “Gearing up for Ultra-High Speed Networks” session. Joining him on the panel were Reinhard Scholl, ITU’s deputy to the director of the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Bureau, and David Bessonen, senior G.fast engineer at Telebyte.

Ovum projects that ITU G.fast subscribers will reach 30 million by 2025. With those numbers in the air, some experts are underlining the importance of interoperability between chipsets for consumer premises equipment and distribution point units. It’s a complicated issue, but fundamental for deployments to scale, they say.

The Broadband Forum also is exhibiting at the Bangkok show in conjunction with Forum member Telebyte. The company is offering a live demonstration of G.fast in a real-world test environment, including products from its ID-337 solution group based on the Broadband Forum’s ID-337 G.fast Certification Test plan.

The Broadband Forum’s work on G.fast is based on ITU-T, which approved its ultrafast broadband standard, designed to deliver access speeds of up to 1 Gbps over existing telephone wires, in conjunction with the Forum’s FTTdp architecture project.

“Consumer demand for high-speed networks, including gigabit access, is increasing all the time,” Frank Van der Putten, rapporteur of the ITU-T Q4/SG15 experts group on broadband access on metallic conductors, says. “It is key that gigabit access technologies are standardized and, more importantly, that the standards organizations facilitate interoperability testing from the start. That is why the work of ITU-T and the Broadband Forum is so vital as we enter the Gigabit Era.”