Reply to post: Pitfalls of G.fast

Sckipio touts fibre-like symmetrical G.fast kit

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Pitfalls of G.fast

Good to see the El-reg highlighting the pitfalls of G.fast, rather than {wonderfully rosy} bullshit articles 'BT tests 'upto' 1GBps G.fast (Copper based) Fibre', negating to state it was over a distance of 10-20m of very high grade new copper in a lab.

Most new cabling (mine is) is fed via road in Parallel lengths of cabling (crosstalk heaven) at street level, not in a star configuration from Poles. Self Powered, back fed from the subscriber is a disaster waiting to happen.

I can't see it ever been accepted in the UK on safety grounds, not sure many subscribers would be happy paying retail electricity prices to Power multinational equipment either. Another great money grabbing scam between BT and the Electricity companies.

In very remote rural locations, it would be safer to loosely lay fibre optic in river beds/ verges, public footpaths etc, and expect some damage, using the revenues to slowly back install this protectively/properly over time, than backfeed power to 'carpet bombed' (in terms of numbers required) G.fast devices.

G.fast is like trying to uniformly light a Christmas tree (representing the UK) with lots of single white narrow focused leds, you need a lot of small leds, very close together, each with its own power requirement, to get blanket coverage. The closer you position the leds together, results in an exponental increase in number of leds required.

The alternative, being separately supplied (on the mains grid) for each G.fast node makes it exponentially expensive for all cable lengths greater than 500 metres (premises 250 metres as the crow flies).

It's not a cheap alternative to real Fibre, its just an alternative that makes use of BT's legacy copper (in the interests of BT, and only BT). It will get rolled out iniitally as 1:1 mapping with existing FTTC Cabinets, so notspots are still notspots. It doesn't much help rurally, because of ongoing maintenance issues (fees for repairs which are set and run by BTOpenreach)

If BT want to lobby/force pointless G.fast by bamboozling MSPs/MPs/Politicians fine, but don't use taxpayers money to fund this Pointless Cul-de-Sac* G.fast Technology, especially as a solution to rural 'upto' Ultrafast broadband.

*Once it reaches it practical limit (more like a practical 'upto' 100-200Mbps if you're lucky, its very,very dependent on so many factors that are impossible to fathom, i.e. which way is the wind blowing today etc), you have to reverse (out the Cul-de-Sac), rip it all out, and start again installing proper Fibre optic - FTTP (which taxpayers should have done in the first place).

Real fibre optic FTTP has so many advantages regarding lower maintenance costs rurally, you have to wonder why G.fast ever gets promoted at all (other than in the interests of BT itself) as a rollout solution for ultrafast Broadband.

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