Ireland incumbent telco eircom said that its deployment of VDSL2 vectoring technology on its fiber to the cabinet (FTTC) network will deliver speeds of up to 100 Mbps to 700,000 locations by the end of the month.
Today, the telco has upgraded 150 of its FTTC-capable Remote Terminal (RT) cabinets with the new technology supplied by Huawei. Vectoring technology, which leverages noise cancelling techniques to eliminate crosstalk, is how it can achieve higher speeds on the existing copper lines between the RT cabinet and the user.
Because the deployment is being done by eircom's wholesale division, the rollout to end users will depend on when its 15 retail service provider partners, such as eircom retail and Vodafone, decide to start offering the service.
Ireland's telecom regulator ComReg told eircom last February that it would have to make any of its new last mile FTTC and Fiber to the Premises (FTTP) networks accessible to competitors.
Carolan Lennon, managing director of eircom Wholesale, told SiliconRepublic.com that it has dedicated €400 million to build out the new FTTC network.
While the VDSL2 and vectoring technology combination will provide it with plenty of bandwidth today, the telco is eying other next-gen last mile technologies like G.fast, which can theoretically deliver up to 1 Gbps of bandwidth over very short copper loops.
"We continue to work closely with our global vendors, such as Huawei, to explore further hugely exciting technological developments in this area, such as G.Fast, which offers the potential of future step changes in both upload and download broadband speeds by driving fibre further out into our network," Lennon said.
For more:
- SiliconRepublic.com has this article
- see the release
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