Over the years a lot of hype has been focused on G.Fast, a technology that lets users deliver significantly faster DSL speeds over copper. The technology uses vectoring to reduce the cross-talk interference that traditionally plagues copper lines, helping companies reduce line noise and boost DSL speeds over short distances. It's of most benefit in terms of apartment complexes or multiple dwelling units, bridging connectivity from the street to individual units using traditional copper.
And while some telcos like Frontier have slowly started using the technology in this fashion, Verizon this week proclaimed it would be
skipping the tech and sticking with more reliable fiber.
“The strategy we’re using today is fiber all the way to the living unit,” Verizon Director of Networking planning Vincent O’Byrne told attendees of an industry event this week. “There’s some small percentage that we use fiber to the building and then copper inside the building itself, but because we have two vendors on BPON and on GPON meant in those units we had 8 types of different MDU units.”
“Our strategy for G.Fast is not to deploy it,” O’Byrne said bluntly.
One of the major reasons for Verizon's skepticism surrounding G.Fast is the problems the company had using VDSL2 over copper to help bridge FiOS connectivity in apartment buildings and MDUs. At the end of the day, G.Fast still runs into the same problems with longer loop lengths degrading speed, and Verizon also found consistent interoperability issues with VDSL2 gear.
“We ended up in a situation where the 13 units of VDSL2 were going end of life as well as lower speed down the surrounding Fios network, which could get up to 1 Gbps,” O’Byrne said. “With G.fast we see ourselves potentially being in the same situation five years from now where we would have to replace the same thing.”