Prequalification of VDSL2 customers for G.fast services

In the near future, digital subscriber line (DSL) network operators will start deploying G.fast technology to stay competitive in the broadband market. G.fast provides data rates of up to 1 Gbps, which is a 10× higher data rate than offered by the widely deployed very high speed DSL 2 (VDSL2) technology. In this paper we propose a novel algorithm to prequalify existing VDSL2 customers for G.fast services. Motivated by testbed and field trial results we also propose a new loop attenuation parameter for prequalification purposes, namely the geometric loop attenuation (GeoLATN) instead of the "classical" loop attenuation (LATN). G.fast testbed experiments show that on average the difference between the attainable net data rates (AttNDR) prequalfied by our algorithm and reported by G.fast systems is 5%. Furthermore, on average the GeoLATN-based prequalification outperforms the LATN-based prequalification by 5% in terms of AttNDR.