European Home Broadband Speeds Edge Closer Towards Gigabit Speeds

Broadband speeds in Europe are getting faster, if only slowly. In 2007, a working 40 gigabits per second internet connection was demonstrated by using a FTTP (Fibre To The Premises) connection to the home. To get an idea of how incredibly fast this is, it’s literally 40 times faster than a standard Ethernet gigabit network port on a PC and 400 times faster than the older 100Mb/s network port. Not much has happened since then though, with broadband speeds only gaining evolutionary, not revolutionary increases. However, German cable operator Kabel Deutschland has now tested a 4.7Gb/s connection to a school using standard copper cabling, by bonding several lines together (exact number not disclosed). Note that this didn’t require any new civil engineering work at the school. Lorenz Glatz, CTO of Kabel Deutschland, said:

“The Schwerin field test shows that an 862 MHz upgraded cable network is able to broadcast download speeds of up to 4.7 Gbit/s. Using this speed, a DVD could theoretically be downloaded within eight seconds. Current standard laptops or modems cannot even process these high speeds. It will take many more years until users find online services and web content that need a download speed of up to 4.7 Gbit/s.”

In the meantime however, the UK’s BT is currently trialling 330Mb/s FTTP broadband, which is due for rollout at the start of July. This is a full third of a gigabit connection, which is still plenty fast for any internet-based services one wants to take of advantage today, assuming the ISP doesn’t throttle the service…