Pity the poor old copper telephone wires. Long branded old technology and disparaged at nearly every turn by the glittering promise of fibre warp speeds, it now looks like we need them more than ever.
Last week the nbn announced that it will be using “G.fast” to supersize our existing copper cables to bring fibre like speeds to the masses.
G.fast, for the uninitiated, is a technology that helps to boost the speed and data capacity of copper wires. There’s a huge amount of effort going in to doing just that around the world with all sorts of new technologies and products (remember VDSL) being trialled or rolled out and with G.fast one of the most commercially successful.
The NBN media release called it “next-generation broadband technology”, saying it will add it to its “Multi-Technology toolkit in 2018”. They go on to say:
“G.fast can take broadband speeds past the current 100Mbps levels delivered by VDSL technology to deliver speeds of up to 1Gbps over copper lines”, and citing major companies like AT&T in the US, BT in the UK, Swisscom and Taiwan’s Chunghwa Telecom already using it.
The reason is that tweaking our existing wire infrastructure at home or in the office will cost us all a lot less to do in the long term. And that’s a compelling story given the NBN’s cost blow outs since it was first announced over a decade ago.
The return of copper to the NBN has been the country’s worst kept secret (OK ) but it’s now a roar given that the nbn brand has become so undermined-the Prime Minister Malcom Turnbull basically called it a mess last week as well.
The move to what’s called multi technologies under the latest version of the NBN thrust copper wires back in to the digital limelight given nearly all of us will get our broadband from the node in the street, not from the side of the house with fibre.
G.fast is just the latest twist in the copper cable for the NBN and it remains to be seen if it’s the network’s saviour or just another layer of confusion in what has been a case study in not how to do digital infrastructure.
Tweaking copper makes great sense of course, but once again we need the government to do it well, communicate it properly and engage the cabling industry in getting it done. Otherwise it will get old very fast.
Cheers
John