Swisscom begins testing FTTx architectures

Swisscom on Thursday revealed plans to test what it calls Fiber to the Street (FTTS), or what is more commonly known as Fiber to the cabinet (FTTC) or Fiber to the node (FTTN), in the municipality of Flerden.

Aiming to be completed by next year, the proposed network will give residential services initially 50 and later 100 Mbps data broadband speeds.

Besides offering higher data speeds, the network will serve as a foundation to enable Swisscom TV customers to simultaneously watch and record several high definition (HD) TV channels as well as transfer data at higher speeds.

For this pilot project, Swisscom is going connect almost all residential homes and businesses in Flerden to the FTTS network, with plans to offer a business-grade service tentatively in Q1 2013.

Unlike other FTTN-like upgrades, the telco plans to lay fiber cables in Thusis that will be then connected to remote terminal (RT) cabinets that will reside about 656 feet away from each premise. From that RT, traffic will be carried over existing copper wires to the customer premises.

Flerden is just one of three communities where it is conducting FTTS trials. It also conducting trials in both Charrat and Grandfontaine and has hatched plans to expand the service across the country.

Over the course of the next eight years, Swisscom has set a goal to provide about 80 percent of the country's homes with higher-speed broadband using a toolkit of FTTS, FTTC and FTTN technologies, and is spending CHF 1.7 billion (USD 1.83 billion) to expand the FTTS network this year.

These latest FTTS trials come after the telco announced in July an aggressive five-year plan to bring Fiber to the Home (FTTH) services to Laussane.

For more:
- see the release

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