Swisscom planning 1Gbps fibre rollout this year
Swisscom is trialling 1Gbps fibre connectivity with a handful of customers, with a view to rolling it out more widely in the coming month.
One hundred of its fibre to the home customers have been upgraded to the 1Gbps connection this month as part of an early-stage trial, which will be extended to several thousand users in October. The Swiss incumbent hopes to have all of its fibre to the home (FTTH) customers on 1Gbps by the end of the year, a sizeable increase on their current 100Mbps connectivity.
It's also hoping to extend its superfast broadband coverage over the coming year or so, taking the reach of its 100Mbps-and-over broadband to 2.3 million premises by 2015.
It will be boosting speeds to the 2.3 million premises using a mixture of several technologies. One million will get FTTH coverage — up from a predicted 700,000 at the end of this year — while the remaining 1.3 million will see their speeds increased to at least 100Mbps through the use of three technologies not previously deployed by Swisscom.
Some 500,000 will get fibre to the building (FTTB) or fibre to the street (FTTS) connectivity, Swisscom said on Thursday, while another 800,000 will get a speed increase though vectoring.
Vectoring is a technology used to cut interference on VDSL connections, increasing the bandwidth available over copper lines. A relatively new and already much hyped technology, vectoring is being tested out by European telcos including BT and Deutsche Telekom.
Swisscom claims vectoring will double the bandwidth on its copper lines, and will begin deploying the technology from the start of next year.