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Usain Bolt challenged to race against 500Mbps G.fast broadband

Israeli modem maker Sckipio has challenged the world’s fastest man to beat its 500Mbps product to a 200m race. 

After venerable tech daily The Register jokingly claimed that Usain Bolt carrying a DVD could get files to your house faster than G.fast, Sckipio returned fire, saying that actually, 16 people could stream 4K Netflix simultaneously with no drop in quality. 

According to Sckipio, their broadband has to race all around buildings, up apartment blocks and into homes. By their arithmetic, when factoring in all the extenuating circumstances, Bolt could only probably only muster around 100Mbps before he collapsed from exhaustion. 

‘4K and 8K video over copper? No problem,’ says ITUJoking aside, Sckipio’s tests recently yielded download speeds of 500Mbps over 200 metres of copper line with its G.fast tech. 

BT’s earlier trials of G.fast saw the British ISP notch up download speeds of 786Mbps and 696Mbps over 19 and 66 metre-long copper loops. 

As with ADSL and FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet) the speeds possible on G.fast depend on the length of the copper last mile. Sckipio’s findings should make for encouraging reading for those living and working in rural areas, where the copper last mile is typically longer than in high-density urban areas.  

BT’s next set of G.fast trails are to take place in a built up urban area and a rural market town to examine how the technology copes in these locations. Depending on the results of these trials, BT expects to launch G.fast products delivering download speeds of 500Mbps by late 2016 at the earliest. 

In the meantime, you could always enlist the help of a world class sprinter to lamb it around clutching your Blu-ray copy of Transformers 4

At over £19.6 million/year, you might not be able to afford Bolt, but that figure certainly makes BT’s old Fibre on Demand service look cheap

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