BT company Openreach has launched what it claims is the first live demonstration of a 100 Gbit/s, ‘hyperfast’ broadband service at the BT R&D centre at Adastral Park in the UK.
The Openreach demonstration involved a standard residential FTTP connection with advanced transmission technology designed to enhance the broadband signal to enable increased capacity sufficient for streaming around 4,000 ultra HD-quality movies simultaneously. Developed jointly with its research partners Huawei, BT believes that the new broadband technology could be used to ‘super-charge’ speeds for business and consumer customers in the future.
Openreach stated that the demonstration utilised test equipment designed to replicate a fibre connection in a real-life setting with a single fibre carrying a 100 Gbit/s signal from exchange equipment over standard technology used in Openreach’s existing FTTP network.
During the next phase of testing, Openreach and Huawei plan to use the high bandwidth achieved to help evolve the global PON standards and to move towards field trials of the technology as the industry matures.
Openreach noted that currently, around 92% of homes and businesses across the UK have access to broadband speeds of 30 Mbit/s and higher. The Openreach fibre network is available to 26.5 million homes and businesses, with more than 100 communications providers offering services over the company’s wholesale fibre network. Openreach aims to make ultra-fast speeds available to up to 12 million premises by the end of 2020 employing a mixture of FTTP and G.fast technologies.
- In October last year, Openreach and Huawei claimed they had become the first companies in Europe to trial new FTTP technology between the University of Suffolk, Ipswich Exchange, and the Adastral Park research centre, during which they achieved 40, 10 and 2.5 Gbit/s speeds delivered simultaneously over a single fibre
