VDSL

Wed Oct 16 08:21:52 UTC 2019

On 10/15/19 1:51 PM, Rod Beck wrote:
> These are large 19th century buildings with courtyards. I have seen lots 
> of activity on this street - fiber being pulled from manhole and gear 
> being installed in cable manholes. Corning on the cables.

Sounds like a fiber-to-the-curb deployment with G.FAST as the last 
"mile".  They run fiber to the nearest pedestal then install a small 
G.FAST ONU/DPU at the pedestal fed by that fiber then delivering 
potentially 500-1000Mbps over the last few 100ft into the existing 
building on existing copper.  Saves them from having to pull new drops 
which can get very expensive.

It's a bit of a stop-gap to a full FTTH deployment, but it'll get you 
very usable service for now and is relatively easily upgraded to full 
FTTH in the future by just pulling a real fiber drop and hooking it up 
to the existing fiber that's being used to feed the G.FAST ONU/DPU.

A lot of the G.FAST ONU/DPUs support VDSL2 fallback which they'll use if 
the copper turns out to be especially terrible, too long, or the 
customer doesn't want more than 50-100Mbps since the VDSL CPEs are 
somewhat significantly cheaper than G.FAST.  Might be where "VDSL" came 
from.

-- 
Brandon Martin