After a more than four-year project phase, the new transmission standard will now be applied across Switzerland as part of the regular Fibre to the Street (FTTS) expansion. The technology will allow Swisscom to quickly and cost-effectively provide high transmission speeds to up to 500 Mbps.
In the course of the more than four-year project phase, Swisscom and its technology partner Huawei worked together to develop specific solutions for the Swiss market. Swisscom had already successfully provided the first pilot customers worldwide with the final standard of G.fast and thereby gathered key insights for its further development in spring 2015. Since September 2016, only G.fast-compatible 16-port hardware has been used for the Switzerland-wide FTTS expansion. With FTTS, fibre-optic cables are laid up to a distance of around 200 metres from the building. We then use the existing copper cable infrastructure for the remaining distance. In 2017, the transmission standard will also be integrated into 48-port hardware as well as into the Fibre to the Building (FTTB) expansion.
G.fast allows Swisscom to reach transmission speeds of up to 500 Mbps. This is made possible through the use of a higher frequency spectrum on copper cables.
Swisscom is investing around CHF 1.8 billion in its IT and infrastructure in 2016. In total, Swisscom connected more than 3.3. million homes and offices with ultra-fast broadband by the end of June 2016 – of which more than 2.2 million were with the latest fibre-optic technologies. The phrase “the latest fibre-optic technologies” is used by Swisscom to refer to fibre-optic technologies, such as Fibre to the Curb (FTTC) with vectoring, Fibre to the Street (FTTS), Fibre to the Building (FTTB) and Fibre to the Home (FTTH).
In the medium to long term, Swisscom intends to modernise the fixed broadband network in all Swiss municipalities. By doing so, 85% of all Swiss households and businesses will benefit from a bandwidth of at least 100 Mpbs by the end of 2020. In terms of broadband coverage, according to the latest Akamai Report[1], Switzerland takes the top spots across Europe and worldwide, and is No. 1 in Europe for high bandwidth coverage (>10 Mbps).
[1] 1 The State of the Internet (2nd quarter 2016): http://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet
