Chunghwa Telecom, Taiwan’s largest service provider, has collaborated with Alcatel-Lucent on what they claim is the world’s first commercial deployment of G.fast access technology.
G.fast uses an architecture called fibre-to-the-distribution-point (FTTdp) to provide ultra-high speeds – which Alcatel-Lucent dubs ‘ultra broadband’ – over short copper tails, allowing operators to take advantage of existing infrastructure for customer connections.
With growing demand for 4K TV and streaming HD video services in Taiwan, the need for ultra-broadband access is steadily increasing. To address this need, Chunghwa Telecom is rolling out fibre nationwide to residential and business customers using a combination of fibre and copper technology. To accelerate these deployments and enable the delivery of near-gigabit speeds, Chunghwa Telecom will deploy Alcatel-Lucent’s GPON and G.fast technologies.
This combination will enable Chunghwa Telecom to provide fast broadband to tens of thousands of homes in Taiwan within two years, and also meet the country’s National Communications Commission plan to improve fixed broadband access in hard-to-reach residential locations. Chunghwa Telecom plans to launch ultra-broadband services using G.fast to 8.4 million Taiwanese homes in the fourth quarter of 2015.
Alcatel-Lucent and its Bell Labs research arm have played a pioneering role in the development of G.fast, which has been in trials with more than 30 operators worldwide (see, for example Energia Communications trials G.fast and TWDM-PON in Japan).
G.fast, in particular, allows service providers to provide ultra-broadband access to locations where fibre deployment is difficult, using the final length of copper infrastructure extending into premises to deliver ultra-high speeds. Furthermore, G.fast eliminates the need to rewire entire buildings and homes, the most costly and time consuming part of any FTTx deployment.
Chunghwa Telecom is deploying Alcatel-Lucent’s 7342 Intelligent ISAM and 7360 ISAM GPON products. The operator will also use Alcatel-Lucent’s G.fast technology incorporated in the 7368 Intelligent Service Access Manager (ISAM) product line, including optical network terminals (ONTs) and customer premise equipment (CPE) with integrated reverse power. The 5520 Access Management System manages the different elements in the deployment, helping to reduce costs and complexity.
Mu-Piao Shih, president of Chunghwa Telecom said: “We have made great strides in proactively improving our broadband network service in recent years, and we are pleased to become the first G.fast commercial broadband service provider in the world. With Alcatel-Lucent’s G.fast technology we will be well equipped to launch an ultra-high-speed network service toward the end of this year and offer our customers the highest broadband service experience, thereby solidifying our leadership in the fibre optics broadband service market ranging from 100Mb/s to 1Gb/s.”
