The ITU has taken an important step forward in the development of G.fast, a new ITU broadband standard, that promises to allow operators to deliver up to 1 Gbit/s over existing copper telephone wires.
The standard would cut costs of delivering the very high speed service because operators would not have to install fiber between the distribution point and people's homes.
The standard took an important step forward with a meeting of ITU-T Study Group 15 this week in Geneva, Switzerland that paves the way for G.fast to be approved in early 2014.
That meeting saw first stage approval of ITU standard, Recommendation ITU-T G.9700, that specifies methods to minimize the risk of G.fast equipment interfering with broadcast services such as FM radio.
Tom Starr, chairman of ITU-T Study Group 15, Working Party 1, which oversees the G.fast effort, explained in a statement that G.fast will allow "service providers will be able to deliver fibre-like performance more quickly and more affordably than with any other approach."
G.fast could be used for such bandwidth-intensive applications such as streaming Ultra-HDTV movies, uploading high-resolution video and photo libraries to cloud-based storage and communicating via HD video, the ITU noted.
The organization said that G.fast also cuts costs by allowing consumers to self-install the services.
A video interview on the subject can be found here.
