Telcos get G.fast edge over cable rivals

Israeli chipmaker Sckipio is giving telcos an edge against their cable rivals in terms of upstream performance.

The start-up recently launched the world's first G.fast solution that promises to deliver up to 1.5Gbps in combined upstream and downstream performance by dynamically allocating the bandwidth in each direction in real time.

Michael Weissman, Sckipio's VP of marketing, described the technology—called dynamic bandwidth solution (DBA)—as the ability to change the existing bandwidth for downstream versus upstream. DBA is already being used in passive optical networks to share bandwidth between users, but with G.fast, the solution is designed to boost the speed of fibre to copper lines in order to give consumers a user-experience that achieves 750Mbps in each direction.

"The way that G.fast works is we allocate the ratio of upstream to downstream through time slots and we allocate a certain percentage of the time for each direction and with DBA we can actually change the capacity by changing the ratio of the timeslots," Weissman said.

With DBA, the system can automatically flip upstream traffic and then switch back to its original status once the task has been traffic.

"This allows the consumers to get the best performance whatever the consumer needs at that time and do that without any human intervention," Weissman said. "The system does it automatically. It does it dynamically."

"With dynamic bandwidth allocation, we believe AT&T can offer up to 750Mbps in both downstream and upstream performance over coax with today's chipsets," said Eddy Barker, Assistant VP of Technical Design & Architecture at AT&T. "In the next generation G.fast chipsets, we should be able to double that target achieving as much as 1.5Gbps in each direction."

"DBA is a G.fast game-changer," said Tim Fell, VP of Video & Broadband Services at TELUS. "In the race to deliver ultra-fast broadband, the ability to offer affordable symmetrical services will give telcos the flexibility required to meet our customers evolving high speed Internet needs."

Sckipio is expected to present the new technology at the upcoming G.fast Summit in Paris.