Taipei, Taiwan – Semi-conductor resource Sckipio Technologies introduced Tuesday what it called “the world’s first G.fast modem chipsets,” aimed at enabling telecom service providers to deliver up to 1Gbps ultra-broadband Internet speeds at low cost per megabit.
The announcement came at Broadband Taiwan during an Institute for Information Industry (III) Generation G Broadband seminar.
Sckipio said its new DP3000 G.fast DPU chipset and CP1000 G.fast CPE chipset deliver 1Gbps-last-mile-broadband access over existing copper wiring.
The new chipsets are based on the ITU ultra-broadband standard, G.fast (Recommendation G.9700/G.9701).
G.fast is a digital subscriber line (DSL) standard under development by the ITU-T promising speeds of 200 Mbit/s to 500 Mbit/s, and possibly as high as 1 Gbit/s in exceptional circumstances.
High speeds are achieved over short loops (shorter than 250 meters). G.fast is a further development of technology used in VDSL, however it is optimized for shorter distances and will not replace VDSL at larger distances.
Sckipio, which was founded in 2012 and is headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel, said G.fast technology will make ultra-broadband affordable and accessible, even in multiple-dwelling housing complexes.
Michael Weissman, Sckipio marketing VP, told TWICE that “one of the biggest advantages of G.fast for the [CE] retail market is that retailers will be able to sell more Ultra HD 4K TVs that support it, offering higher broadband speed in the home.”
“Ultra HDTV adoption will be limited by a lack of connectivity to the pay TV service to deliver 4K streams. A typical service provider needs nearly 100 percent headroom on the stream to guarantee a certain service. A 4K stream will require somewhere around 20-25Mbps per stream so with a 100 percent headroom, they will need 40-50Mbps of capacity to safely deliver content,” Weissman said.
“If a service provider wants to deliver four concurrent streams, that means the service provider will need 160-200Mbps of bandwidth,” he continued. “Today, telcos are challenged technically to achieve this goal. They need an alternative to VDSL (which lacks the capacity). They have two choices: fiber and G.fast. Fiber has been prohibitively expensive and is very challenging to roll out quickly. The alternative is G.fast. G.fast is going to be the best way. It delivers the reliability and performance of fiber but at a cost and ease of deployment more similar to ADSL (user self installation). This will allow telcos to quickly meet the requirements needed to support UHDTV. “
Weissman said that G.fast will accelerate Ultra High Definition TV deployment. This will increase demand for such products sold at retail. “It will also provide ultra broadband to many more consumers,” Weissman said. “This will increase the demand of cloud-based services – which may impact demand for local devices such as hard drives used in backups. This will be a few years before it is meaningful.”
Other benefits of G.fast will be the opportunity for “high definition video chat, increasing the demand for video sharing technologies; increasing the capacity for consumers to use Internet of Things devices and send the data to the cloud.”
G.fast will also increase the backhaul capacity of in-home cellular technology such as small cells – improving the bandwidth for mobile users as well, Weissman added.
The G.fast distribution point units (DPU) get deployed within 250 meters of the home and can support up to 16 residences per DPU.
Boxes receive fiber optic input and enable traffic to run at 1Gbps over the existing copper wiring from the distribution point box to each consumer’s residence.
In-home G.fast modems are consumer-installable and leverage existing copper wiring so expensive, professional in-home installations are unnecessary, the company said. This eliminates the need to drill into walls, dig up yards or deal with time-consuming in-home installations.
The Sckipio’s G.fast chipsets are said to be optimized for the high-performance requirements of G.fast, and are “not a re-spin of previous VDSL solutions.”
The DP3000 G.fast DPU chipsets simultaneously support four 1 Gbps G.fast ports, up to 10Gbps of aggregated backhaul, and full built-in vectoring support for as many as 64 subscribers.
“Sckipio is delivering on the full promise of G.fast,” stated David Baum, Sckipio co-founder and CEO. “With Sckipio’s new G.fast chipsets, service providers won’t have to wait to get real G.fast with all the features and benefits that G.fast has to offer.”
Before today’s announcement, prevailing expectations in the telecommunications market had previously set G.fast’s arrival to occur in late 2016.
Robin Mersh, CEO of the Broadband Forum, a global consortium of broadband service providers and vendors, said, “G.fast is a very important part of the next generation for last-mile broadband access, which is based around our Fiber to the Distribution point (FTTdp) architecture. Many of our members are excited to test and deploy G.fast-based solutions as soon as possible.”
At the same time, Sckipio also introduced two reference designs supporting its new chipsets: DP3016-EVM – a 16-port G.fast DPU reference design for use in FTTdp architectures, and CP1000-EVM – a CPE bridge design for integration into residential gateways or for creation of stand-alone bridges.
Sckipio also announced nine G.fast devices that will use Sckipio G.fast modems including four DPU devices, a residential gateway and four CPE bridges. Suttle, XAVi and Zinwell will all supply both DPU devices and CPE devices. VTech will supply a DPU, a residential gateway and a bridge device.
Sckipio said Lantiq is the first company to introduce a residential gateway reference design built around the Sckipio standard compliant G.fast solution, bringing gigabit speeds into the home.
Sckipio said it is working with many OEMs, ODMs, and service providers to facilitate the pent-up demand for G.fast, and is already shipping engineering samples of the chipsets.
